Determination of electromagnetic source localization with factorization method

The factorization method (FM) is an attractive qualitative inverse scattering technique for the detection of geometrical features of unknown objects. This method depends on the selection of regularization parameters slightingly and has low calculation necessities. The aim of this work is to present a near-field FM for inverse source problems that have many applications. A modified test equation is obtained by converting the far-field term to Hankel's function. A different method has been proposed by manipulating the asymptotic approximation of Hankel's function in order to obtain near-field equations with incident angle and distance parameters. The novelty of this study is an integral equation based on the FM, which consists of multifrequency sparse near-field electric field measurements. We proved that the solution of the proposed integral equation gives information about the location of scatterers. The proposed algorithm is validated with simulation results and the capabilities of the presented method are assessed with several frequency regions and sources. Additionally, the presented method is compared with the direct sampling method in order to understand the performance of the proposed approach over a given scenario. The developed FM provides accurate results for electromagnetic source problems. Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press in association with the European Microwave Association.