Imaging With Nature: Compressive Imaging Using a Multiply Scattering Medium

The recent theory of compressive sensing leverages upon the structure of signals to acquire them with much fewer measurements than was previously thought necessary, and certainly well below the traditional Nyquist-Shannon sampling rate. However, most implementations developed to take advantage of this framework revolve around controlling the measurements with carefully engineered material or acquisition sequences. Instead, we use the natural randomness of wave propagation through multiply scattering media as an optimal and instantaneous compressive imaging mechanism. Waves reflected from an object are detected after propagation through a well-characterized complex medium. Each local measurement thus contains global information about the object, yielding a purely analog compressive sensing method. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for optical imaging by using a 300-micrometer thick layer of white paint as the compressive imaging device. Scattering media are thus promising candidates for designing efficient and compact compressive imagers.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figure

OMP-type Algorithm with Structured Sparsity Patterns for Multipath Radar Signals

A transmitted, unknown radar signal is observed at the receiver through more than one path in additive noise. The aim is to recover the waveform of the intercepted signal and to simultaneously estimate the direction of arrival (DOA). We propose an approach exploiting the parsimonious time-frequency representation of the signal by applying a new OMP-type algorithm for structured sparsity patterns. An important issue is the scalability of the proposed algorithm since high-dimensional models shall be used for radar signals. Monte-Carlo simulations for modulated signals illustrate the good performance of the method even for low signal-to-noise ratios and a gain of 20 dB for the DOA estimation compared to some elementary method

Convex Optimization Approaches for Blind Sensor Calibration using Sparsity

We investigate a compressive sensing framework in which the sensors introduce a distortion to the measurements in the form of unknown gains. We focus on blind calibration, using measures performed on multiple unknown (but sparse) signals and formulate the joint recovery of the gains and the sparse signals as a convex optimization problem. We divide this problem in 3 subproblems with different conditions on the gains, specifially (i) gains with different amplitude and the same phase, (ii) gains with the same amplitude and different phase and (iii) gains with different amplitude and phase. In order to solve the first case, we propose an extension to the basis pursuit optimization which can estimate the unknown gains along with the unknown sparse signals. For the second case, we formulate a quadratic approach that eliminates the unknown phase shifts and retrieves the unknown sparse signals. An alternative form of this approach is also formulated to reduce complexity and memory requirements and provide scalability with respect to the number of input signals. Finally for the third case, we propose a formulation that combines the earlier two approaches to solve the problem. The performance of the proposed algorithms is investigated extensively through numerical simulations, which demonstrates that simultaneous signal recovery and calibration is possible with convex methods when sufficiently many (unknown, but sparse) calibrating signals are provided

Joint ML calibration and DOA estimation with separated arrays

This paper investigates parametric direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation in a particular context: i) each sensor is characterized by an unknown complex gain and ii) the array consists of a collection of subarrays which are substantially separated from each other leading to a structured noise covariance matrix. We propose two iterative algorithms based on the maximum likelihood (ML) estimation method adapted to the context of joint array calibration and DOA estimation. Numerical simulations reveal that the two proposed schemes, the iterative ML (IML) and the modified iterative ML (MIML) algorithms for joint array calibration and DOA estimation, outperform the state of the art methods and the MIML algorithm reaches the Cram\'er-Rao bound for a low number of iterations