Acoustic metamaterials have been proposed for numerous applications including subwavelength imaging, impedance matching, and lensing. Yet, their application in compressive sensing and imaging has not been fully investigated. When metamaterials are used as resonators at certain frequencies, they can generate random radiation patterns in the transmitted and received waves to and from a target. Compressive sensing favors such randomness inasmuch as it can increase incoherence by decreasing the amount of mutual information between any two different measurements. This study aims at assessing whether the use of resonating metamaterial unit cells in a single-layered array between a number of ultrasound transceivers and targets can improve the sensing capacity, point-spread function of the sensing array (their beam focusing ability), and imaging performance in pointlike target detection. The theoretical results are promising and can open the way for more efficient metamaterial designs with the aim of enhancing ultrasound imaging with lower number of transceivers compared to the regular systems.
Performance limits of a compressive sensing application to beamforming on a line array