A Super-Resolution Imaging Method Based on a Left-Handed Material and a Diffusion Model

This article proposes a super-resolution imaging method based on a left-handed material cylindrical lens (LHCL) and a diffusion model (DM). First, to recover the super-resolution information loss in the received scattered field (SF), we design an LHCL with a solid immersion mechanism (SIM). With the evanescent wave components recovered by the LHCL’s physical characteristics, the imaging resolution can reach <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$0.04\lambda $ </tex-math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$0.0157\lambda $ </tex-math></inline-formula> in the radial and tangential directions, respectively. Due to the narrow focus range inside the LHCL, a DM is used to overcome the limitations of the imaging region. Combining the physical characteristics of the LHCL with the nonlinear fitting abilities of the DM, our method can realize high-quality inverse scattering imaging for different targets and performs better both in generalization and noise resistance compared with traditional iterative methods and the U-Net method.