  In this article, we consider the inverse problem of determining spatially
heterogeneous absorption and diffusion coefficients from a single measurement
of the absorbed energy (in the steady-state diffusion approximation of light
transfer). This problem, which is central in quantitative photoacoustic
tomography, is in general ill-posed since it admits an infinite number of
solution pairs. We show that when the coefficients are known to be piecewise
constant functions, a unique solution can be obtained. For the numerical
determination of the coefficients, we suggest a variational method based based
on an Ambrosio-Tortorelli-approximation of a Mumford-Shah-like functional,
which we implemented numerically and tested on simulated two-dimensional data.
