Information content in inverse source with symmetry and support priors

This paper illustrates how inverse source problems are affected by certain symmetry and support priors concerning the source space. The study is developed for a prototype configuration where the field radiated by square integrable strip sources is observed in far-zone. Three symmetry priors are considered: the source is a priori known to be a real or Hermitian or even (resp. odd) function. Instead, as spatial priors we assume that the source support consists of a single or multiple disjoint domains. The role of the aforementioned priors is assessed against some metrics commonly used to characterise inverse source problems such as the number of degrees of freedom, the point-spread function and the “information content” measured through the Kolmogorov entropy.