Planar Metasurface Antenna with Tunable via Boundaries for Computational Imaging

TL;DR

This paper introduces a boundary-tunable metasurface antenna for computational microwave imaging, enabling diverse measurement modes without lenses or phase shifters, and demonstrates its effectiveness through simulations and noise robustness tests.

Contribution

It presents a novel boundary-tunable metasurface antenna that enhances measurement diversity for microwave imaging, outperforming frequency diversity methods.

Findings

Boundary tuning effectively changes waveguide modes.

The antenna supports diverse measurement modes.

Robust imaging achieved at 15 dB SNR.

Abstract

The fusion of metasurface antennas and computational imaging facilitates the design of microwave imaging systems which require no lenses, phase shifters or moving parts. The technique involves the generation of appropriately designed diverse measurement modes to encode the scene information into a small number of measurements. We propose a novel boundary-tunable parallel plate waveguide-based metasurface antenna for computational microwave imaging. The proposed antenna leverages a switchable boundary of two layers of vias, to efficiently change the waveguide modes supported by the antenna cavity, leading to diverse measurement modes in the scene plane. The superiority of the boundary tuning approach over the frequency diversity approach for the same antenna is confirmed using the singular value decomposition. Synthetic imaging is performed using a coupled dipole model, which quantitatively proves the efficacy of the proposed antenna along with the robustness against noise down to 15 dB SNR.