Sensitivity Analysis for Antenna Near-Field Imaging

Although imaging and inverse scattering problems have been thoroughly studied during the last century, there is only a partial understanding of these complex problems. Most of the efforts have been placed on the development of efficient inversion algorithms and mathematical uniqueness results. In comparison, there are very few results and a limited knowledge about the information content in the inversion data. In this paper, we provide a mathematical framework for sensitivity analysis of antenna near-field imaging problems, based on the multipole expansion of the electromagnetic field and the Fisher information to quantify the quality of data. By exploiting this framework, a fundamental relation for accuracy and resolution is formulated based on the Crameacuter-Rao bound (CRB). The sensitivity analysis is illustrated using a relevant example with cylindrical measurement data