Towards real-time three-dimensional (3d) imaging using dynamic metasurface antennas

Dynamic Metasurface Antennas (DMAs) have been recently proposed as a computational imaging platform that relaxes the hardware constraints. These antennas produce tailored radiation patterns to multiplex the spatial information from the scene compressing the measurements into a single channel. Despite simplifying the hardware layer, the compression of the signal sets challenges in image reconstruction. The indirect sampling of the imaged scene makes it necessary to use computationally intense sensing-matrix based solutions since Fourier-based image reconstruction techniques are not directly applicable. In this paper, a bistatic case using DMAs as transmit and receive apertures is discussed and a pre-processing step is proposed to render the measurement set compatible with conventional Fourier-based imaging algorithms. The performance of the reconstruction algorithm including the pre-processing step is demonstrated when the algorithm is parallelized using a single Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) card arguing that real-time image reconstruction is possible when imaging with DMAs.