Near-Field Transverse Resolution in Planar Source Reconstructions

This article deals with the classical question of estimating the achievable resolution in terms of the configuration parameters in inverse source problems. In particular, the study focuses on the case of a planar surface magnetic current which is to be reconstructed from near-field observed over a bounded rectangular aperture parallel to the source domain. Resolution formulas are well known for far-field or Fresnel-zone configurations, and also for near-field cases, when data are full-view or a measurement aperture is an unbounded plane. For the case of bounded near-field observations, the resolution estimations mainly rely on some asymptotic arguments in order to mimic far-field reasoning. Here, the plan is to improve these results and to work out a resolution estimation that precisely captures the spatially varying behavior entailed by the near-field and aspect-limited configuration. To this end, the pertinent radiation operator is inverted by an adjoint inversion scheme (a back-propagation-like method) and the corresponding point-spread function is analytically estimated. Numerical examples show that the derived resolution estimation clearly points out the role of the geometrical parameters of the configuration and it is more accurate than other literature results.