The local backward heat problem

In this paper, we study the local backward problem of a linear heat equation with time-dependent coefficients under the Dirichlet boundary condition. Precisely, we recover the initial data from the observation on a subdomain at some later time. Thanks to the “optimal filtering” method of Seidman, we can solve the global backward problem, which determines the solution at initial time from the known data on the whole domain. Then, by using a result of controllability at one point of time, we can connect local and global backward problem.