Microwave Integrated Sensing and Imaging Using Reconfigurable Metacavity

The rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT) has sparked significant demand for target localization and recognition. In this article, we propose a new hardware solution—reconfigurable metacavity (RM)—to enable the realization of microwave integrated sensing and imaging (ISAI). The proposed RM features an electrically oversized metacavity, with its back wall replaced by a reconfigurable metasurface and its top surface etched with leaky cross-shaped irises. By electronically tuning each constitutive element of the reconfigurable metasurface, the RM can generate low-correlated chaotic wavefronts to form a sensing matrix, thereby facilitating the realization of compressive sensing (CS)-based direction-of-arrival (DoA) estimation and computational imaging (CI) using the same hardware architecture. The proposed RM enables a single-channel configuration that achieves physical layer compression through its sensing matrix, offering a complexity-reduced, energy-efficient, and cost-effective solution for ISAI applications.