Bandlimited Spatial Field Sampling with Mobile Sensors in the Absence of Location Information

Sampling of physical fields with mobile sensor is an emerging area. In this context, this work introduces and proposes solutions to a fundamental question: can a spatial field be estimated from samples taken at unknown sampling locations? Unknown sampling location, sample quantization, unknown bandwidth of the field, and presence of measurement-noise present difficulties in the process of field estimation. In this work, except for quantization, the other three issues will be tackled together in a mobile-sampling framework. Spatially bandlimited fields are considered. It is assumed that measurement-noise affected field samples are collected on spatial locations obtained from an unknown renewal process. That is, the samples are obtained on locations obtained from a renewal process, but the sampling locations and the renewal process distribution are unknown. In this unknown sampling location setup, it is shown that the mean-squared error in field estimation decreases as $O(1/n)$ where $n$ is the average number of samples collected by the mobile sensor. The average number of samples collected is determined by the inter-sample spacing distribution in the renewal process. An algorithm to ascertain spatial field's bandwidth is detailed, which works with high probability as the average number of samples $n$ increases. This algorithm works in the same setup, i.e., in the presence of measurement-noise and unknown sampling locations.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Trans on Signal Processin

Universal Spatiotemporal Sampling Sets for Discrete Spatially Invariant Evolution Systems

Let $(I,+)$ be a finite abelian group and $\mathbf{A}$ be a circular convolution operator on $\ell^2(I)$. The problem under consideration is how to construct minimal $\Omega \subset I$ and $l_i$ such that $Y=\{\mathbf{e}_i, \mathbf{A}\mathbf{e}_i, \cdots, \mathbf{A}^{l_i}\mathbf{e}_i: i\in \Omega\}$ is a frame for $\ell^2(I)$, where $\{\mathbf{e}_i: i\in I\}$ is the canonical basis of $\ell^2(I)$. This problem is motivated by the spatiotemporal sampling problem in discrete spatially invariant evolution systems. We will show that the cardinality of $\Omega$ should be at least equal to the largest geometric multiplicity of eigenvalues of $\mathbf{A}$, and we consider the universal spatiotemporal sampling sets $(\Omega, l_i)$ for convolution operators $\mathbf{A}$ with eigenvalues subject to the same largest geometric multiplicity. We will give an algebraic characterization for such sampling sets and show how this problem is linked with sparse signal processing theory and polynomial interpolation theory

SAMPLING AND RECONSTRUCTING DIFFUSION FIELDS IN PRESENCE OF ALIASING

The reconstruction of a diffusion field, such as temperature, from samples collected by a sensor network is a classical inverse problem and it is known to be ill-conditioned. Previous work considered source models, such as sparse sources, to regularize the solution. Here, we consider uniform spatial sampling and reconstruction by classical interpolation techniques for those scenarios where the spatial sparsity of the sources is not realistic. We show that even if the spatial bandwidth of the field is infinite, we can exploit the natural lowpass filter given by the diffusion phenomenon to bound the aliasing error. Index Terms — Diffusion equation, initial inverse problems, spatial sampling, aliasing error, interpolation. 1