Metasurface-driven compressive electromagnetic DOA estimation, linear-polarization characterization, and three-dimensional localization

In this paper, we propose a compressive electromagnetic (EM) direction-of-arrival (DoA) estimation and three-dimensional (3D) localization method driven by a reconfigurable metasurface (RM). The employed RM is composed of switchable meta-atoms with two orthogonal orientations that dynamically reconfigure the aperture masks, thereby producing dual-polarized, reconfigurable, quasi-random radiation patterns. These radiation patterns act as measurement modes to enable compressive EM DoA estimation. Moreover, by calculating the amplitude ratio between DoA patterns under two orthogonal polarization states, the proposed approach can also determine the linear polarization characteristics of far-field sources. In addition, by deploying two RMs, the spatial position of far-field sources can be estimated (i.e., 3D localization), further extending the application potential of the RM-driven compressive EM sensing framework.