PSF Analysis of the Inverse Source and Scattering Problems for Strip Geometries

Abstract

This paper is concerned with estimating the achievable resolution in the reconstruction of strip sources from the knowledge of its radiated field and strip objects from the knowledge of its scattered field. In particular, the study focuses on the evaluation of the point spread function (PSF), providing the reconstruction of a point-like unknown. Since this can be performed only numerically for most geometries, an approximate closed-form evaluation is introduced and compared with the exact one. Numerical results confirm the approximation accuracy, at least in the main lobe region of the PSF, which is the most important, as far as the discussion about resolution is concerned. The main results of the analysis concern the space invariance of the PSF of the considered geometries, which means that resolution is the same over the whole investigation domain, and the appreciation of its values for the inverse source and scattering problems.