General rights This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite only the published version using the reference above. Full terms of use are available: Abstract. The paper describes a general approach for processing data from a guided wave transducer array on a plate-like structure. The problem of finding optimal array element layout, which allows the number of elements and amount of measured data to be minimized without compromising array performance, is

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... red. It is shown that in the case of the far field imaging the image can be reconstructed using much fewer array elements than the classical Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem requires. A new sampling criterion is derived and an optimised sparse array layout is proposed. The theory is validated experimentally using a guided wave array containing electromagnetic acoustic transducer elements for exciting and detecting the S0 Lamb wave mode in a 3-mm-thick aluminium plate.