Efficient and Accurate Frequency Estimation of Multiple Superimposed Exponentials in Noise

The estimation of the frequencies of multiple superimposed exponentials in noise is an important research problem due to its various applications from engineering to chemistry. In this paper, we propose an efficient and accurate algorithm that estimates the frequency of each component iteratively and consecutively by combining an estimator with a leakage subtraction scheme. During the iterative process, the proposed method gradually reduces estimation error and improves the frequency estimation accuracy. We give theoretical analysis where we derive the theoretical bias and variance of the frequency estimates and discuss the convergence behaviour of the estimator. We show that the algorithm converges to the asymptotic fixed point where the estimation is asymptotically unbiased and the variance is just slightly above the Cramer-Rao lower bound. We then verify the theoretical results and estimation performance using extensive simulation. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is capable of obtaining more accurate estimates than state-of-art methods with only a few iterations.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figure

Electronics for Sensors

The aim of this Special Issue is to explore new advanced solutions in electronic systems and interfaces to be employed in sensors, describing best practices, implementations, and applications. The selected papers in particular concern photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) and silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) interfaces and applications, techniques for monitoring radiation levels, electronics for biomedical applications, design and applications of time-to-digital converters, interfaces for image sensors, and general-purpose theory and topologies for electronic interfaces

Colocated multiple-input multiple-output radars for smart mobility

In recent years, radars have been used in many applications such as precision agriculture and advanced driver assistant systems. Optimal techniques for the estimation of the number of targets and of their coordinates require solving multidimensional optimization problems entailing huge computational efforts. This has motivated the development of sub-optimal estimation techniques able to achieve good accuracy at a manageable computational cost. Another technical issue in advanced driver assistant systems is the tracking of multiple targets. Even if various filtering techniques have been developed, new efficient and robust algorithms for target tracking can be devised exploiting a probabilistic approach, based on the use of the factor graph and the sum-product algorithm. The two contributions provided by this dissertation are the investigation of the filtering and smoothing problems from a factor graph perspective and the development of efficient algorithms for two and three-dimensional radar imaging. Concerning the first contribution, a new factor graph for filtering is derived and the sum-product rule is applied to this graphical model; this allows to interpret known algorithms and to develop new filtering techniques. Then, a general method, based on graphical modelling, is proposed to derive filtering algorithms that involve a network of interconnected Bayesian filters. Finally, the proposed graphical approach is exploited to devise a new smoothing algorithm. Numerical results for dynamic systems evidence that our algorithms can achieve a better complexity-accuracy tradeoff and tracking capability than other techniques in the literature. Regarding radar imaging, various algorithms are developed for frequency modulated continuous wave radars; these algorithms rely on novel and efficient methods for the detection and estimation of multiple superimposed tones in noise. The accuracy achieved in the presence of multiple closely spaced targets is assessed on the basis of both synthetically generated data and of the measurements acquired through two commercial multiple-input multiple-output radars