The Likelihood Encoder for Lossy Compression

A likelihood encoder is studied in the context of lossy source compression. The analysis of the likelihood encoder is based on the soft-covering lemma. It is demonstrated that the use of a likelihood encoder together with the soft-covering lemma yields simple achievability proofs for classical source coding problems. The cases of the point-to-point rate-distortion function, the rate-distortion function with side information at the decoder (i.e. the Wyner-Ziv problem), and the multi-terminal source coding inner bound (i.e. the Berger-Tung problem) are examined in this paper. Furthermore, a non-asymptotic analysis is used for the point-to-point case to examine the upper bound on the excess distortion provided by this method. The likelihood encoder is also related to a recent alternative technique using properties of random binning

Space Time MUSIC: Consistent Signal Subspace Estimation for Wide-band Sensor Arrays

Wide-band Direction of Arrival (DOA) estimation with sensor arrays is an essential task in sonar, radar, acoustics, biomedical and multimedia applications. Many state of the art wide-band DOA estimators coherently process frequency binned array outputs by approximate Maximum Likelihood, Weighted Subspace Fitting or focusing techniques. This paper shows that bin signals obtained by filter-bank approaches do not obey the finite rank narrow-band array model, because spectral leakage and the change of the array response with frequency within the bin create \emph{ghost sources} dependent on the particular realization of the source process. Therefore, existing DOA estimators based on binning cannot claim consistency even with the perfect knowledge of the array response. In this work, a more realistic array model with a finite length of the sensor impulse responses is assumed, which still has finite rank under a space-time formulation. It is shown that signal subspaces at arbitrary frequencies can be consistently recovered under mild conditions by applying MUSIC-type (ST-MUSIC) estimators to the dominant eigenvectors of the wide-band space-time sensor cross-correlation matrix. A novel Maximum Likelihood based ST-MUSIC subspace estimate is developed in order to recover consistency. The number of sources active at each frequency are estimated by Information Theoretic Criteria. The sample ST-MUSIC subspaces can be fed to any subspace fitting DOA estimator at single or multiple frequencies. Simulations confirm that the new technique clearly outperforms binning approaches at sufficiently high signal to noise ratio, when model mismatches exceed the noise floor.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures. Accepted in a revised form by the IEEE Trans. on Signal Processing on 12 February 1918. @IEEE201

Deducing effective light transport parameters in optically thin systems

We present an extensive Monte Carlo study on light transport in optically thin slabs, addressing both axial and transverse propagation. We completely characterize the so-called ballistic-to-diffusive transition, notably in terms of the spatial variance of the transmitted/reflected profile. We test the validity of the prediction cast by diffusion theory, that the spatial variance should grow independently of absorption and, to a first approximation, of the sample thickness and refractive index contrast. Based on a large set of simulated data, we build a freely available look-up table routine allowing reliable and precise determination of the microscopic transport parameters starting from robust observables which are independent of absolute intensity measurements. We also present the Monte Carlo software package that was developed for the purpose of this study

Efficient analysis in planet transit surveys

With the growing number of projects dedicated to the search for extrasolar planets via transits, there is a need to develop fast, automatic, robust methods with a statistical background in order to efficiently do the analysis. We propose a modified analysis of variance (AoV) test particularly suitable for the detection of planetary transits in stellar light curves. We show how savings of labor by a factor of over 10 could be achieved by the careful organization of computations. Basing on solid analytical statistical formulation, we discuss performance of our and other methods for different signal-to-noise and number of observations.Comment: 7 pages, to be published in MNRAS, downloadable software from http://www.camk.edu.pl/~alex/#softwar

Fixed-Length Strong Coordination

We consider the problem of synthesizing joint distributions of signals and actions over noisy channels in the finite-length regime. For a fixed blocklength $n$ and an upper bound on the distance $\varepsilon$, a coding scheme is proposed such that the induced joint distribution is $\varepsilon$-close in $L^1$ distance to a target i.i.d. distribution. The set of achievable target distributions and rate for asymptotic strong coordination can be recovered from the main result of this paper by having $n$ that tends to infinity.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure