Compressive Sensing with Wigner $D$-functions on Subsets of the Sphere

In this paper, we prove a compressive sensing guarantee for restricted measurement domains in spherical near-field to far-field transformations for antenna metrology. We do so by first defining Slepian functions on a measurement sub-domain $R$ of the rotation group $\sot$, the full domain of the linear inverse problem associated with spherical near-field to far-field transformations. Then, we transform the inverse problem from the measurement basis, the bounded orthonormal system of band-limited Wigner $D$-functions on $\sot$, to the Slepian functions in a way that limits increases to signal sparsity. Contrasting methods using Wigner $D$-functions that require measurements on all of $\sot$, we show that the orthogonality structure of the Slepian functions only requires measurements on the sub-domain $R$, which is select-able. Due to the particulars of this approach and the inherent presence of Slepian functions with low concentrations on $R$, our approach gives the highest accuracy when the signal under study is well concentrated on $R$. We provide numerical examples of our method in comparison with other classical and compressive sensing approaches. In terms of reconstruction quality, we find that our method outperforms the other compressive sensing approaches we test and is at least as good as classical approaches but with a significant reduction in the number of measurements.