IRS-Aided Over-the-Air Image Processing: Single Antenna Imaging

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has emerged as a promising communication technology to increase throughput and facilitate communication in non-line-of-sight scenarios. While existing studies primarily focus on the application of IRS in communication tasks, its unique capability to precisely control radio frequency ($\mathbf{R F}$) signal reflections offers untapped potential for non-communication purposes. This paper ventures into an innovative domain and explores the application of IRS properties for image processing tasks conducted over the air. We introduce a novel scheme called “single antenna imaging”, a proof-of-concept scheme for over-the-air image processing. This approach leverages analog modulation and compressed sensing techniques to reconstruct high-quality images from a limited number of transmissions between multiple transmit antennas and a single receive antenna. Evaluations using the Kodak image dataset show that the proposed scheme can retrieve the same quality images with over 40% reduction in traffic compared to the simple minimum norm solution (MNS) and linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) schemes.