Beamforming and holography image formation methods: An analytic study

Beamforming and holographic imaging procedures are widely used in many applications such as radar sensing, sonar, and in the area of microwave medical imaging. Nevertheless, an analytical comparison of the methods has not been done. In this paper, the Point Spread Functions pertaining to the two methods are analytically determined. This allows a formal comparison of the two techniques, and to easily highlight how the performance depends on the configuration parameters, including frequency range, number of scatterers, and data discretization. It is demonstrated that the beamforming and holography basically achieve the same resolution but beamforming requires a cheaper (less sensors) configuration.