Spoof Surface Plasmon-Based Single-Shot Super-Resolution Compressive Imaging

A spoof surface plasmon (SPP) transmission line (TL)-based low-cost near-field imaging system is proposed. Its signal processing part uses a compressive sensing algorithm, which is able to accurately image a sparse scene. Unlike conventional multiple antenna-based imaging, a single-radiator system requires a highly dispersive element. Utilizing this dispersion of radiated pattern, frequency diversity can be used to replace the spatial diversity of conventional systems. The concept is tested through experiments performed on three SPP TLs with different groove depths. It is found that a dispersive SPP TL can actually achieve a high subwavelength resolution of 5 mm (~0.05λ where λ is the air wavelength at 3 GHz), while operating within the frequency range of 1-5 GHz.