Conventional microwave imagers usually require either time-consuming data acquisition, or complicated reconstruction algorithms for data post-processing, making them largely ineffective for complex in-situ sensing and monitoring. Here, we experimentally report a real-time digital-metasurface imager that can be trained in-situ to generate the radiation patterns required by machine-learning optimized measurement modes. This imager is electronically reprogrammed in real time to access the optimized solution for an entire data set, realizing storage and transfer of full-resolution raw data in dynamically varying scenes. High-accuracy image coding and recognition are demonstrated in situ for various image sets, including hand-written digits and through-wall body gestures, using a single physical hardware imager, reprogrammed in real time. Our electronically controlled metasurface imager opens new venues for intelligent surveillance, fast data acquisition and processing, imaging at various frequencies, and beyond.

Nonlinear electromagnetic (EM) inverse scattering is a quantitative and super-resolution imaging technique, in which more realistic interactions between the internal structure of scene and EM wavefield are taken into account in the imaging procedure, in contrast to conventional tomography. However, it poses important challenges arising from its intrinsic strong nonlinearity, ill-posedness, and expensive computational costs. To tackle these difficulties, we, for the first time to our best knowledge, exploit a connection between the deep neural network (DNN) architecture and the iterative method of nonlinear EM inverse scattering. This enables the development of a novel DNN-based methodology for nonlinear EM inverse problems (termed here DeepNIS). The proposed DeepNIS consists of a cascade of multilayer complex-valued residual convolutional neural network modules. We numerically and experimentally demonstrate that the DeepNIS outperforms remarkably conventional nonlinear inverse scattering methods in terms of both the image quality and computational time. We show that DeepNIS can learn a general model approximating the underlying EM inverse scattering system. It is expected that the DeepNIS will serve as powerful tool in treating highly nonlinear EM inverse scattering problems over different frequency bands, which are extremely hard and impractical to solve using conventional inverse scattering methods.

There is an increasing need to remotely monitor people in daily life using radio-frequency probe signals. However, conventional systems can hardly be deployed in real-world settings since they typically require objects to either deliberately cooperate or carry a wireless active device or identification tag. To accomplish complicated successive tasks using a single device in real time, we propose the simultaneous use of a smart metasurface imager and recognizer, empowered by a network of artificial neural networks (ANNs) for adaptively controlling data flow. Here, three ANNs are employed in an integrated hierarchy, transforming measured microwave data into images of the whole human body, classifying specifically designated spots (hand and chest) within the whole image, and recognizing human hand signs instantly at a Wi-Fi frequency of 2.4 GHz. Instantaneous in situ full-scene imaging and adaptive recognition of hand signs and vital signs of multiple non-cooperative people were experimentally demonstrated. We also show that the proposed intelligent metasurface system works well even when it is passively excited by stray Wi-Fi signals that ubiquitously exist in our daily lives. The reported strategy could open up a new avenue for future smart cities, smart homes, human-device interaction interfaces, health monitoring, and safety screening free of visual privacy issues.

Digital coding representations of meta‐atoms make it possible to realize intelligent designs of metasurfaces by means of machine learning algorithms. Here, a machine‐learning method to design anisotropic digital coding metasurfaces is proposed, and meta‐atoms may require any absolute phase values at different positions and under different polarizations. A deep‐learning neural network to predict the vast and complex system is proposed, in which only 70 000 training coding patterns are used to train the network. Another 10 000 randomly chosen coding patterns are employed to validate the neural network, showing an accuracy of 90.05% of phase responses with 2° error in the 360° phase. Using the learned network, the correct coding pattern among 18 billion of billions of choices for the required phase can be readily found in a second, finishing automatic design of anisotropic meta‐atoms. Three functional 1‐bit anisotropic coding metasurfaces are intelligently achieved by the learned network. It is convenient to realize dual‐beam scattering with left‐handed circular polarization (LHCP) for one beam while right‐handed circular polarization (RHCP) for the others, dual‐beam scattering with circular polarization for one beam while linear polarization (LP) for the others, and triple‐beam scattering with LHCP and RHCP for two beams while LP for the third one.