Wave Manipulating RIS for Enhanced Tomographic Imaging: Concept and Recent Advances

The use of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) in RF-based Imaging methods is showing promising results to overcome the limitations of the current generation of communications and sensing systems. The easy integration into modern systems and the ubiquity of the WiFi technology call for a deeper exploration into the possibility to exploit such a technology for advanced imaging applications. In this context, the possibility to integrate RISs in RF-based imaging applications must be carefully analyzed due to the intrinsic limitations of the propagation control enabled by such class of reconfigurable metasurfaces. In this work, the problem of performing tomographic imaging based on the integration of existing WiFi systems and RISs is addressed, and the proper tradeoff between methodological approach complexity and resulting imaging quality is discussed