Reconfigurable metasurface antenna-based Mills-Cross compressive aperture for computational microwave imaging

Reconfigurable metasurface-based antennas are gaining increasing attention for radar imaging applications. Especially, they play a major role in computational imaging (CI) systems at microwave frequencies, as they provide high-flexibility to generate the required spatially diverse patterns. In this contribution, the usage of reconfigurable antennas is analyzed in the framework of a hybrid microwave imaging system, aiming at exploiting the advantages of both CI and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) paradigms. Experimental results show that the combination of both approaches yields a reduced hardware complexity (as only two 1D single-fed antennas are employed to synthesize a full 2D aperture), a significant increase in the data acquisition speed (as CI enables to drastically decrease the number of measurements required compared to a conventional SAR-based system) and an enhanced target to clutter ratio (thanks to the combination of a reduced number of measurement positions and several reconfiguration states of the antennas).