Guest editorial: special cluster on electromagnetic imaging and sensing: from innovative antenna designs and processing algorithms to advanced applications

Electromagnetic imaging and sensing systems have witnessed significant development and are becoming increasingly popular in multiple applications such as nondestructive evaluation, vehicle safety and medical diagnosis. Furthermore, the development of current and future communication systems contributes to this trend, bringing at the same time a new set of opportunities and challenges. As a result, a significant research effort has been devoted to developing innovative antenna designs and advanced processing algorithms to deal with the increasingly demanding requirements of imaging and sensing systems. In particular, the wide range of potential application settings (i.e., portable systems, indoor versus outdoor operation, the use of fixed base stations, near-field versus far-field operation), yield to significantly different requirements of the overall system, both in terms of hardware and processing algorithms. This is driving the optimization of the hardware layer, in particular the antennas, with the ultimate goal of not only improving their performance, but also achieving simpler, more robust and cost-effective solutions. This is also fostering the development of innovative techniques to deal with the growing demand for real-time operation as well as advanced sensing features (such as target recognition, classification, super-resolution and motion deblurring, to name a few).