Comparing beamforming and holography in a homogeneous 2-D scenario

A formal rigorous comparison of the Beamforming and Holographic Imaging techniques are carried out in this paper against a common scenario that enables an analytic description of the scattering phenomenon. This comparison is particularly useful in the area of microwave breast cancer imaging applications, where detection techniques are normally limited to diverse datasets and radar configurations. The comparison is performed in terms of the geometrical characteristics of the point spread function (PSF) which is the image of a point scatterer as seen by the imaging systems. An accurate analysis of each algorithm is carried out in terms of critical parameters such as the operating frequency range and the number of scatterers. This formal analytical approach enables a rigorous performance comparison of these techniques.