Planar Metasurface Antenna with Tunable via Boundaries for Computational Imaging

Abstract: The fusion of metasurface antennas and computational imaging facilitates the design of microwave imaging systems which require no lenses, phase shifters or moving parts. The technique involves the generation of appropriately designed diverse measurement modes to encode the scene information into a small number of measurements. We propose a novel boundary-tunable parallel plate waveguide-based metasurface antenna for computational microwave imaging. The proposed antenna leverages a switchable boundary of two layers of vias, to efficiently change the waveguide modes supported by the antenna cavity, leading to diverse measurement modes in the scene plane. The superiority of the boundary tuning approach over the frequency diversity approach for the same antenna is confirmed using the singular value decomposition. Synthetic imaging is performed using a coupled dipole model, which quantitatively proves the efficacy of the proposed antenna along with the robustness against noise down to 15 dB SNR.