Abstract
Observers are well known in control theory. Originally designed to estimate the hidden states of dynamical systems given some measurements, the observers scope has been recently extended to the estimation of some unknowns, for systems governed by partial differential equations. In this paper, observers are used to solve inverse source problem for a one-dimensional wave equation. An adaptive observer is designed to estimate the state and source components for a fully discretized system. The effectiveness of the algorithmis emphasized in noise-free and noisy cases and an insight on the impact ofmeasurements' size and location is provided.