Analysis of the sparse super resolution limit using the Cramér-Rao lower bound

Abstract: Already since the work by Abbe and Rayleigh the difficulty of super resolution where one wants to recover a collection of point sources from low-resolved microscopy measurements is thought to be dependent on whether the distance between the sources is below or above a certain resolution or diffraction limit. Even though there has been a number of approaches to define this limit more rigorously, there is still a gap between the situation where the task is known to be hard and scenarios where the task is provably simpler. For instance, an interesting approach for the univariate case using the size of the Cram\'er-Rao lower bound was introduced in a recent work by Ferreira Da Costa and Mitra. In this paper, we prove their conjecture on the transition point between good and worse tractability of super resolution and extend it to higher dimensions. Specifically, the bivariate statistical analysis allows to link the findings by the Cram\'er-Rao lower bound to the classical Rayleigh limit.