1-D Mirrored Aperture Synthesis Based on Artificial Magnetic Conductor

In 1-D mirrored aperture synthesis (MAS), the antenna array arrangement and metal reflector are crucial in determining the rank of the transformation matrix. Accurate cosine visibility is achievable only when the transformation matrix is full rank. However, the anti-phase characteristic of the metal reflector introduces nonzero elements of “−1” into the matrix, leading to rank deficiency (RD). This letter proposes a method of using artificial magnetic conductor (AMC) with in-phase reflection property instead of metal reflector to ensure that the transformation matrix only contains nonzero elements “1.” Based on this property, the rank of both linear and nonlinear arrays is verified. The results indicate that AMC can effectively enhance the rank of the transformation matrix, potentially achieving full rank. Additionally, further verification is performed on the reconstruction of trapezoidal extended source scene using two types of arrays. The results demonstrate that AMC-based 1-D MAS can achieve a low root-mean-square error (RMSE), significantly improving the quality of the reconstructed images.