Proposal for the Realization of a Single-Detector Acoustic Camera Using a Space-Coiling Anisotropic Metamaterial

Acoustic imaging is important in diverse applications, such as target tracking, clinical treatment, and structural health monitoring, but is limited by hardware complexity, as an acoustic camera relies on a group of detectors to image sound sources. This study uses spatially encoded structures to solve the problem of single-detector planar acoustic imaging at audio frequencies: A space-coiling metamaterial with high anisotropy is proposed to realize a single-detector acoustic camera. This design outperforms the conventional acoustic camera in terms of dimensions, bandwidth, and cost, and is expected to have real impact on engineering in single-detector acoustic imaging.