Reconfigurable Metacavity Antenna-Based Microwave Computational Imaging

In this paper, a reconfigurable metacavity antenna (RMA) is proposed to generate sufficient measurement modes for implementing microwave computational imaging (MCI) within a limited bandwidth. The RMA is essentially a metacavity antenna, with its back side replaced by a reconfigurable metasurface and its top surface etched with circular leaky irises. By altering the on/off states of the PIN diodes loaded onto the reconfigurable metasurface, the resonant mode inside the metacavity is modulated, thereby radiating chaotic wavefronts. These lowcorrelated radiated fields can be used to encode the imaging scene, which are referred to as measurement modes in an MCI system. MCI experiments are conducted at 20 GHz using full-wave simulations. Two configurations, RMA-to-probe and RMA-to-RMA, are analyzed, highlighting the enhanced imaging performance achieved under the RMA-to-RMA layout.