  In this paper we consider a problem of initial data identification from the
final time observation for homogeneous parabolic problems. It is well-known
that such problems are exponentially ill-posed due to the strong smoothing
property of parabolic equations. We are interested in a situation when the
initial data we intend to recover is known to be sparse, i.e. its support has
Lebesgue measure zero. We formulate the problem as an optimal control problem
and incorporate the information on the sparsity of the unknown initial data
into the structure of the objective functional. In particular, we are looking
for the control variable in the space of regular Borel measures and use the
corresponding norm as a regularization term in the objective functional. This
leads to a convex but non-smooth optimization problem. For the discretization
we use continuous piecewise linear finite elements in space and discontinuous
Galerkin finite elements of arbitrary degree in time. For the general case we
establish error estimates for the state variable. Under a certain structural
assumption, we show that the control variable consists of a finite linear
combination of Dirac measures. For this case we obtain error estimates for the
locations of Dirac measures as well as for the corresponding coefficients. The
key to the numerical analysis are the sharp smoothing type pointwise finite
element error estimates for homogeneous parabolic problems, which are of
independent interest. Moreover, we discuss an efficient algorithmic approach to
the problem and show several numerical experiments illustrating our theoretical
results.
