Automated Metrics to Assess the Performance of Computational Imaging Systems

Computational imaging (CI) has emerged as a promising alternative to overcome some drawbacks of conventional radar imaging systems. CI relies on using compressive antennas to achieve physical layer compression. However, as these antennas radiate quasi-random spatially incoherent patterns and they operate in the near-field, commonly used merit figures for conventional imaging systems do not always provide an accurate characterization of the performance of CI imagers. This paper proposes several metrics, which are computed automatically, to quantitatively analyze the expected imaging performance.