This paper is dedicated to a new way of presenting the Tikhonov regularization in the form of a mixed formulation. Such formulation is well adapted to the regularization of linear ill-posed partial differential equations because when it comes to discretization, the mixed formulation enables us to use some standard finite elements. As an application of our theory, we consider an inverse obstacle problem in an acoustic waveguide. In order to solve it we use the so-called “exterior approach”, which couples the mixed formulation of Tikhonov regularization and a level set method. Some 2d numerical experiments show the feasibility of our approach.