Frequency-diverse metasurface antenna for computational through-wall imaging

Computational imaging has emerged as a promising paradigm to overcome some drawbacks of conventional radar systems based on raster scanning. This approach relies on using compressive antennas that radiate quasi-random spatially incoherent patterns, which in turn enables to compress the information from the imaged scene into a single channel (or a reduced number of channels). Despite the success of computational imaging for multiple free-space applications (such as personnel screening), its extension to deal with through-wall imaging scenarios has been hardly explored. This contribution presents a frequency-diverse antenna working at X-band to perform through-wall computational imaging. First, we show that the designed antenna radiates distinct patterns as a function of frequency, which is essential to achieve physical layer compression. Then, we demonstrate the capability of this antenna to detect targets hidden behind a wall, provided that a clutter removal technique is applied to mitigate the wall reflection.