Frequency Domain Image Reconstruction for Imaging With Multistatic Dynamic Metasurface Antennas

Dynamic metasurface antennas (DMAs) have recently been introduced as a computational imaging (CI) platform that offers significant advantages over conventional imaging systems. Such antennas are able to produce tailored radiation patterns that are later used to encode the scene’s information into a few measurements. However, since the signal is compressed, image reconstruction in the frequency domain using the conventional range migration algorithm (RMA) cannot be directly applied to CI-based apertures synthesized with DMAs. More sophisticated algorithms need to be developed to overcome this limitation, which transfers the complexity of such systems to the software layer. This paper proposes a new multistatic DMA RMA (MD-RMA) technique that achieves decompression of the compressed signals collected from multistatic DMA apertures and processes the decompressed data in the Fourier domain followed by a multistatic-to-monostatic conversion. Simulation results verify that the proposed approach can produce high quality 3D radar images, which alleviates the need to mechanically move the aperture. Moreover, since the image reconstruction is fully conducted in the frequency domain, leveraging the fast Fourier transform (FFT) algorithm, the complexity of the algorithm, and thus the execution time, is significantly reduced in contrast with conventional spatial domain algorithms.