Single-pixel polarimetric direction of arrival estimation using programmable coding metasurface aperture.

Area of Science:

• Electromagnetics and Wave Propagation
• Metamaterials and Metasurfaces
• Signal Processing and Estimation Theory

Background:

• Traditional Direction of Arrival (DoA) estimation methods often require complex sensor arrays.
• Compressive Sensing (CS) offers a framework for reconstructing signals from undersampled measurements.
• Polarimetric information provides crucial details about wave characteristics beyond spatial location.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a single-pixel system for polarimetric Direction of Arrival (DoA) estimation.
• To leverage a programmable coding metasurface for efficient spatial encoding and compression.
• To demonstrate the retrieval of high-fidelity polarimetric DoA information from compressed data.

Main Methods:

• A cavity-backed programmable coding metasurface aperture with dynamically modulated waveform diversity was employed.
• Spatially incoherent radiation masks encoded incoming plane waves onto a single channel.
• The wave-chaotic metasurface's polarimetric properties were utilized to ensure sensitivity to wave polarization states.

Main Results:

• The proposed single-pixel technique successfully retrieved polarimetric DoA information from compressed measurements.
• Encoding and compression of far-field incident waves into a single channel yielded high-fidelity results.
• The metasurface's structured sparsity of dual-polarized coded metamaterial elements enabled the proof of concept.

Conclusions:

• A novel single-pixel polarimetric compressive sensing (CS) approach for DoA estimation is demonstrated.
• The integration of programmable metasurfaces enables efficient, high-fidelity polarimetric DoA retrieval.
• This method offers a promising alternative to traditional array-based DoA estimation techniques.