Range Decoupling Algorithm for Accelerating Metamaterial Apertures-Based Computational Imaging

Metamaterial apertures-based computation imaging system enables interrogating the scene information with frequency-diverse complex radiation fields, reducing the complicated active components and mechanical scanning equipments. Nevertheless, when pursuing an accurate perception of the surrounding environment, the natural discretization of imaging volume would inevitably pose the massive amount of data and burdensome computation for the three-dimensional (3-D) image formation. In this paper, we propose a range decoupling algorithm to accelerate the image generation of metamaterial apertures imaging system operating in the far-field. The algorithm could achieve the dimension reduction through exploiting the local frequency coherence of the metamaterial apertures antenna radiation fields, allowing the scene to be decomposed into a number of range cells and reconstructed in a parallel fashion. In this sense, the crucial memory requirements and prohibitively high computation costs could be mitigated while the high-quality 3-D images are maintained. Extensive imaging simulations are conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.