Abstract
We develop a linearized boundary control method for the inverse boundary value problem of determining a density in the acoustic wave equation. The objective is to reconstruct an unknown perturbation in a known background density from the linearized Neumann-to-Dirichlet map. A key ingredient in the derivation is a linearized Blagoves̆c̆enskiĭ's identity with a free parameter. When the linearization is at a constant background density, we derive two reconstructive algorithms with stability estimates based on the boundary control method. When the linearization is at a non-constant background density, we establish an increasing stability estimate for the recovery of the density perturbation. The proposed reconstruction algorithms are implemented and validated with several numerical experiments to demonstrate the feasibility.