ANN-enabled Direction Finding with Space-Time-Coding Metasurface

In this paper, a method combining artificial neural networks (ANNs) with space-time-coding (STC) digital metasurfaces is proposed for the direction finding of incoming waves. ANN-based direction finding achieves high accuracy by simply analyzing the spatial spectrum characteristics of STC modulation, which uses only harmonic amplitudes. This method can effectively solve the problems of complex hardware architectures, large computational resources, and high costs that arise from traditional direction finding techniques. It has a broad application prospect in wireless sensing, communications, radar, and other information systems.