Examples disclosed herein relate to an autoencoder assisted radar for target identification. The radar includes an Intelligent Metamaterial (“iMTM”) antenna module to radiate a transmission signal with an iMTM antenna structure and generate radar data capturing a surrounding environment, a data pre-processing module having an autoencoder to encode the radar data into an information-dense representation, and an iMTM perception module to detect and identify a target in the surrounding environment based on the information-dense representation and to control the iMTM antenna module. An autoencoder for assisting a radar system and a method for identifying a target with an autoencoder assisted radar in a surrounding environment are also disclosed herein.