Compressive inverse scattering using ultrashort pulses

Inverse scattering refers the retrieval of the unknown constitutive parameters from measured scattered wave fields, and has many applications such as ultrasound imaging, optics, T-ray imaging, radar, and etc. Two distinct imaging strategies have been commonly used: narrow band inverse scattering approaches using a large number of transmitters and receivers, or wideband imaging approaches with smaller number of transmitters and receivers. In some biomedical imaging applications, the limited accessibility of scattered fields using externally located antenna arrays usually prefers the wideband imaging approaches. The main contribution of this paper is, therefore, to analyze the wideband inverse scattering problem from compressive sensing perspective. Specifically, the mutual coherence of the wideband imaging geometry is analyzed, which reveals a significant advantage to identify the sparse targets from very limited number of measurements.