A free field recovery technique based on the boundary element method and three-dimensional scanning measurements.

The boundary element method- (BEM-) based free field recovery technique (FFRT) has been proposed to recover the free field radiated by an arbitrarily shaped source from the mixed field that would be measured in a noisy environment. However, that technique requires that the boundary integral equation should be established on an enclosed hologram surface surrounding the source, which means that the hologram surface should be discretized into elements and the measurement points should be located on the nodes of the elements. For large-scale or mid-high frequency problems, it makes the total number of measurement points huge since it should obey the criterion of more than six elements per wavelength, which put forward very high requirements for holographic data measurement. To overcome this problem, a more flexible BEM-based FFRT without the restriction on the locations of measurement points is proposed in this study. In virtue of this, a three-dimensional scanning measurement method can be applied to acquire holographic data with high efficiency. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated by two numerical simulations and an experiment.