Abstract: | In this paper, we consider the inverse scattering problem of reconstructing a bounded obstacle in a three-dimensional planar waveguide from the scattered near-field data measured on a finite cylindrical surface containing the obstacle and corresponding to infinitely many incident point sources also placed on the measurement surface. The obstacle is allowed to be an impenetrable scatterer or a penetrable scatterer. We establish the validity of the factorization method with the nearfield data to characterize the obstacle in the planar waveguide by constructing an outgoing-to-incoming operator which is an integral operator defined on the measurement surface with the kernel given in terms of an infinite series. |