Compressive acoustic imaging with metamaterials

Abstract

Compressive imaging has brought revolutionary design methodologies to imaging systems. By shuffling and multiplexing the object information space, the imaging system compresses data on the physical layer and enables employing fewer sensors and acquiring less data than traditional isomorphic mapping imaging systems. Recently metamaterials have been investigated for designing compressive imager. Metamaterials are engineered materials with properties that are usually unattainable in nature. Acoustic metamaterials can possess highly anisotropy, strongly dispersion, negative dynamic density, or bulk modulus, and they open up new possibilities of wave-matter interaction and signal modulation. In this work, we designed, fabricated, and tested a metamaterial-based single detector, 360 degree field of view compressive acoustic imager. Local resonator arrays are design to resonate randomly in both spatial and spectrum dimensions to favor compressive imaging task. The presented experimental results show that with only about 60 measured values, the imager is able to reconstruct a scene of more than 1000 sampling points in space, achieving a compression ratio of about 20:1. Multiple static and moving target imaging task were performed with this low cost, single detector, non-mechanical scanning compressive imager. Our work paves the way for designing metamaterials based compressive acoustic imaging system.