Compressive Imaging of Subwavelength Structures

The problem of imaging extended targets (sources or scatterers) is formulated in the framework of compressed sensing with emphasis on subwavelength resolution. The proposed formulation of the problems of inverse source/scattering is essentially exact and leads to the random partial Fourier measurement matrix in the case of periodic targets. In the case of square-integrable targets, the proposed sampling scheme in the Littlewood-Paley wavelet basis block-diagonalizes the scattering matrix with each block in the form of a random partial Fourier matrix corresponding to each dyadic scale of the target. The resolution issue is analyzed from two perspectives: stability and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The subwavelength modes are shown to be typically unstable unless the measurement is carried out in near field. The number of the stable modes typically increases as the negative dth (the dimension of the target) power of the distance between the target and the sensors/source (in the unit of wavelength). The resolution limit is shown to be inversely proportional to the SNR in the high SNR limit. Numerical simulations are provided to validate the theoretical predictions.