Microwave Integrated Sensing and Imaging Using Reconfigurable Metacavity

Abstract

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.