Microwave Reconstruction Method Based on Information Metamaterials and End-to-End Deep Learning

Microwave computational imaging (MCI) based on coded apertures does not rely on relative motion between the radar platform and the target, enabling forward-looking imaging. The performance of MCI depends on the computational methods and modulation of the coded aperture, particularly its design. However, current research methods treat the optimization of the coded aperture and computational imaging processing as independent tasks, with no unified framework to link these two aspects, limiting the potential for improving system performance. This paper proposes a novel deep learning-based MCI framework that jointly optimizes the coded aperture and image reconstruction process. Unlike traditional methods that decouple these two stages, our approach trains the sensing and reconstruction networks in an end-to-end fashion. The key novelty lies in constructing an end-to-end imaging network based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) where the coded aperture is modeled as a convolutional layer within the network. Physical constraints on the coded aperture are enforced by adding regularizers to the loss function. Simulation experiments demonstrate that under low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and low compression ratio conditions, the proposed method improves peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) by 5 dB to 8 dB, enhances SSIM by 10% to 15%, and reduces relative imaging error by 0.5% to 1%.