Time-Frequency Distribution for Undersampled Non-stationary Signals using Chirp-based Kernel

Missing samples and randomly sampled nonstationary signals give rise to artifacts that spread over both the time-frequency and the ambiguity domains. These two domains are related by a two-dimensional Fourier transform. As these artifacts resemble noise, the traditional reduced interference signal-independent kernels, which belong to Cohen’s class, cannot mitigate them efficiently. In this paper, a novel signal-independent kernel in the ambiguity domain is proposed. The proposed method is based on three important facts. Firstly, any windowed non-stationary signal can be approximated as a sum of chirps. Secondly, in the ambiguity domain, any chirp resides inside certain regions, which just occupy half of the ambiguity plane. Thirdly, the missing data artifacts always appear along the Doppler axis where the chirps auto-terms do not appear. Therefore, we propose using a chirp-based fixed kernel on windowed non-stationary signals in order to remove half of the noise-like artifacts in the ambiguity domain and compensate for the missing data effect located along the Doppler axis. It is shown that our method outperforms other reduced interference time-frequency distributions

Adaptive Interference Removal for Un-coordinated Radar/Communication Co-existence

Most existing approaches to co-existing communication/radar systems assume that the radar and communication systems are coordinated, i.e., they share information, such as relative position, transmitted waveforms and channel state. In this paper, we consider an un-coordinated scenario where a communication receiver is to operate in the presence of a number of radars, of which only a sub-set may be active, which poses the problem of estimating the active waveforms and the relevant parameters thereof, so as to cancel them prior to demodulation. Two algorithms are proposed for such a joint waveform estimation/data demodulation problem, both exploiting sparsity of a proper representation of the interference and of the vector containing the errors of the data block, so as to implement an iterative joint interference removal/data demodulation process. The former algorithm is based on classical on-grid compressed sensing (CS), while the latter forces an atomic norm (AN) constraint: in both cases the radar parameters and the communication demodulation errors can be estimated by solving a convex problem. We also propose a way to improve the efficiency of the AN-based algorithm. The performance of these algorithms are demonstrated through extensive simulations, taking into account a variety of conditions concerning both the interferers and the respective channel states

Identification of Ghost Targets for Automotive Radar in the Presence of Multipath

Colocated multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology has been widely used in automotive radars as it provides accurate angular estimation of the objects with relatively small number of transmitting and receiving antennas. Since the Direction Of Departure (DOD) and the Direction Of Arrival (DOA) of line-of-sight targets coincide, MIMO signal processing allows forming a larger virtual array for angle finding. However, multiple paths impinging the receiver is a major limiting factor, in that radar signals may bounce off obstacles, creating echoes for which the DOD does not equal the DOA. Thus, in complex scenarios with multiple scatterers, the direct paths of the intended targets may be corrupted by indirect paths from other objects, which leads to inaccurate angle estimation or ghost targets. In this paper, we focus on detecting the presence of ghosts due to multipath by regarding it as the problem of deciding between a composite hypothesis, ${\cal H}_0$ say, that the observations only contain an unknown number of direct paths sharing the same (unknown) DOD's and DOA's, and a composite alternative, ${\cal H}_1$ say, that the observations also contain an unknown number of indirect paths, for which DOD's and DOA's do not coincide. We exploit the Generalized Likelihood Ratio Test (GLRT) philosophy to determine the detector structure, wherein the unknown parameters are replaced by carefully designed estimators. The angles of both the active direct paths and of the multi-paths are indeed estimated through a sparsity-enforced Compressed Sensing (CS) approach with Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) optimization to estimate the angular parameters in the continuous domain. An extensive performance analysis is finally offered in order to validate the proposed solution.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figure

Interference Removal for Radar/Communication Co-existence: the Random Scattering Case

In this paper we consider an un-cooperative spectrum sharing scenario, wherein a radar system is to be overlaid to a pre-existing wireless communication system. Given the order of magnitude of the transmitted powers in play, we focus on the issue of interference mitigation at the communication receiver. We explicitly account for the reverberation produced by the (typically high-power) radar transmitter whose signal hits scattering centers (whether targets or clutter) producing interference onto the communication receiver, which is assumed to operate in an un-synchronized and un-coordinated scenario. We first show that receiver design amounts to solving a non-convex problem of joint interference removal and data demodulation: next, we introduce two algorithms, both exploiting sparsity of a proper representation of the interference and of the vector containing the errors of the data block. The first algorithm is basically a relaxed constrained Atomic Norm minimization, while the latter relies on a two-stage processing structure and is based on alternating minimization. The merits of these algorithms are demonstrated through extensive simulations: interestingly, the two-stage alternating minimization algorithm turns out to achieve satisfactory performance with moderate computational complexity