Assessing the potential of using a virtual Veselago lens in quantitative microwave imaging

Abstract

This study explores the potential of implementing the focusing properties of a virtual ideal Veselago lens within a standard free-space microwave imaging scenario. To achieve this, the virtual lens is introduced as an inhomogeneous numerical background for the inverse source problem. This numerical Vesealgo lens is incorporated into the incident and scattered field decomposition, resulting in a new data equation that involves the Veselago lens Green’s function. In addition to the contrast sources within the object-of-interest, the lens introduces virtual contrast sources along the lens boundaries that depend on the total tangential magnetic field. It is shown that a surface integral contribution that takes into account these surface contrast sources must be added to the collected free-space data before one can invert using the well-conditioned Veselago lens inversion operator. A preliminary investigation of the accuracy to which this surface integral contribution must be computed is performed using additive Gaussian noise. Results show that an error of less than one percent is required to achieve imaging performance similar to utilizing an actual Veselago lens. All results are performed within a 2D simulation environment.