A new algorithm for high-quality ionogram generation and analysis

Standard digital ionograms that are generated by fast Fourier transform or autoregressive modeling suffer from high interference levels due to other users of the HF channel which produce artifacts and distortion, hence complicating automatic processing and information extraction. In this paper, a new method is proposed to obtain high-quality ionograms of the desired layer reflections and automatically extract important information such as critical frequencies. Following the standard procedures, two sets of periodograms are obtained by using rectangular and Blackman windows. These two periodograms are filtered and fused utilizing an automatic edge-detection-based time-frequency detector. The fused ionogram provides sharp description of the layer reflections with very low sidelobe structure (ringing). The performance of this new ionogram algorithm is tested using chirp sounder data collected from an oblique midlatitude path. It is observed that the presented algorithm is highly successful in obtaining robust and sharp ionograms free of artifacts. Furthermore, a new algorithm is proposed for automated computation of dispersion and critical frequencies of the magnetoionic components detected on the ionogram. Since efficient signal-processing algorithms are utilized, the proposed method can be implemented in real time

Multipath Separation-Direction of Arrival (MS-DOA) with Genetic Search Algorithm for HF channels

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Direction-of-Arrival (DOA) defines the estimation of arrival angles of an electromagnetic wave impinging on a set of sensors. For dispersive and time-varying HF channels, where the propagating wave also suffers from the multipath phenomena, estimation of DOA is a very challenging problem. Multipath Separation-Direction of Arrival (MS-DOA), that is developed to estimate both the arrival angles in elevation and azimuth and the incoming signals at the output of the reference antenna with very high accuracy, proves itself as a strong alternative in DOA estimation for HF channels. In MS-DOA, a linear system of equations is formed using the coefficients of the basis vector for the array output vector, the incoming signal vector and the array manifold. The angles of arrival in elevation and azimuth are obtained as the maximizers of the sum of the magnitude squares of the projection of the signal coefficients on the column space of the array manifold. In this study, alternative Genetic Search Algorithms (GA) for the maximizers of the projection sum are investigated using simulated and experimental ionospheric channel data. It is observed that GA combined with MS-DOA is a powerful alternative in online DOA estimation and can be further developed according to the channel characteristics of a specific HF link. (C) 2009 COSPAR. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserve

SAR image reconstruction and autofocus by compressed sensing

Cataloged from PDF version of article.A new SAR signal processing technique based on compressed sensing is proposed for autofocused image reconstruction on subsampled raw SAR data. It is shown that, if the residual phase error after INS/GPS corrected platform motion is captured in the signal model, then the optimal autofocused image formation can be formulated as a sparse reconstruction problem. To further improve image quality, the total variation of the reconstruction is used as a penalty term. In order to demonstrate the performance of the proposed technique in wide-band SAR systems, the measurements used in the reconstruction are formed by a new under-sampling pattern that can be easily implemented in practice by using slower rate A/D converters. Under a variety of metrics for the reconstruction quality, it is demonstrated that, even at high under-sampling ratios, the proposed technique provides reconstruction quality comparable to that obtained by the classical techniques which require full-band data without any under-sampling. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Cross-ambiquity function domain multipath channel parameter estimation

Cataloged from PDF version of article.A new array signal processing technique is proposed to estimate the direction-of-arrivals (DOAs), time delays, Doppler shifts and amplitudes of a known waveform impinging on an array of antennas from several distinct paths. The proposed technique detects the presence of multipath components by integrating cross-ambiguity functions (CAF) of array outputs, hence, it is called as the cross-ambiguity function direction finding (CAF-DF). The performance of the CAF-DF technique is compared with the space-alternating generalized expectation-maximization (SAGE) and the multiple signal classification (MUSIC) techniques as well as the Cramer-Rao lower bound. The CAF-DF technique is found to be superior in terms of root-mean-squared-error (rMSE) to the SAGE and MUSIC techniques. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Time-frequency analysis of signals using support adaptive Hermite-Gaussian expansions

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Since Hermite–Gaussian (HG) functions provide an orthonormal basis with the most compact time– frequency supports (TFSs), they are ideally suited for time–frequency component analysis of finite energy signals. For a signal component whose TFS tightly fits into a circular region around the origin, HG function expansion provides optimal representation by using the fewest number of basis functions. However, for signal components whose TFS has a non-circular shape away from the origin, straight forward expansions require excessively large number of HGs resulting to noise fitting. Furthermore, for closely spaced signal components with non-circular TFSs, direct application of HG expansion cannot provide reliable estimates to the individual signal components. To alleviate these problems, by using expectation maximization (EM) iterations, we propose a fully automated pre-processing technique which identifies and transforms TFSs of individual signal components to circular regions centered around the origin so that reliable signal estimates for the signal components can be obtained. The HG expansion order for each signal component is determined by using a robust estimation technique. Then, the estimated components are post-processed to transform their TFSs back to their original positions. The proposed technique can be used to analyze signals with overlapping components as long as the overlapped supports of the components have an area smaller than the effective support of a Gaussian atom which has the smallest time-bandwidth product. It is shown that if the area of the overlap region is larger than this threshold, the components cannot be uniquely identified. Obtained results on the synthetic and real signals demonstrate the effectiveness for the proposed time–frequency analysis technique under severe noise cases. © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Perturbed Orthogonal Matching Pursuit

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Compressive Sensing theory details how a sparsely represented signal in a known basis can be reconstructed with an underdetermined linear measurement model. However, in reality there is a mismatch between the assumed and the actual bases due to factors such as discretization of the parameter space defining basis components, sampling jitter in A/D conversion, and model errors. Due to this mismatch, a signal may not be sparse in the assumed basis, which causes significant performance degradation in sparse reconstruction algorithms. To eliminate the mismatch problem, this paper presents a novel perturbed orthogonal matching pursuit (POMP) algorithm that performs controlled perturbation of selected support vectors to decrease the orthogonal residual at each iteration. Based on detailed mathematical analysis, conditions for successful reconstruction are derived. Simulations show that robust results with much smaller reconstruction errors in the case of perturbed bases can be obtained as compared to standard sparse reconstruction techniques

A robust compressive sensing based technique for reconstruction of sparse radar scenes

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Pulse-Doppler radar has been successfully applied to surveillance and tracking of both moving and stationary targets. For efficient processing of radar returns, delay–Doppler plane is discretized and FFT techniques are employed to compute matched filter output on this discrete grid. However, for targets whose delay–Doppler values do not coincide with the computation grid, the detection performance degrades considerably. Especially for detecting strong and closely spaced targets this causes miss detections and false alarms. This phenomena is known as the off-grid problem. Although compressive sensing based techniques provide sparse and high resolution results at sub-Nyquist sampling rates, straightforward application of these techniques is significantly more sensitive to the off-grid problem. Here a novel parameter perturbation based sparse reconstruction technique is proposed for robust delay– Doppler radar processing even under the off-grid case. Although the perturbation idea is general and can be implemented in association with other greedy techniques, presently it is used within an orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) framework. In the proposed technique, the selected dictionary parameters are perturbed towards directions to decrease the orthogonal residual norm. The obtained results show that accurate and sparse reconstructions can be obtained for off-grid multi target cases. A new performance metric based on Kullback–Leibler Divergence (KLD) is proposed to better characterize the error between actual and reconstructed parameter spaces. Increased performance with lower reconstruction errors are obtained for all the tested performance criteria for the proposed technique compared to conventional OMP and 1 minimization techniques. © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserve

Sparse ground-penetrating radar imaging method for off-the-grid target problem

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Spatial sparsity of the target space in subsurface or through-the-wall imaging applications has been successfully used within the compressive-sensing framework to decrease the data acquisition load in practical systems, while also generating high-resolution images. The developed techniques in this area mainly discretize the continuous target space into grid points and generate a dictionary of model data that is used in image-reconstructing optimization problems. However, for targets that do not coincide with the computation grid, imaging performance degrades considerably. This phenomenon is known as the off-grid problem. This paper presents a novel sparse ground-penetrating radar imaging method that is robust for off-grid targets. The proposed technique is an iterative orthogonal matching pursuit-based method that uses gradient-based steepest ascent-type iterations to locate the off-grid target. Simulations show that robust results with much smaller reconstruction errors are obtained for multiple off-grid targets compared to standard sparse reconstruction techniques. (c) 2013 SPIE and IS&

On robust solutions to linear least squares problems affected by data uncertainty and implementation errors with application to stochastic signal modeling

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Engineering design problems, especially in signal and image processing, give rise to linear least squares problems arising from discretization of some inverse problem. The associated data are typically subject to error in these applications while the computed solution may only be implemented up to limited accuracy digits, i.e., quantized. In the present paper, we advocate the use of the robust counterpart approach of Ben-Tal and Nemirovski to address these issues simultaneously. Approximate robust counterpart problems are derived, which leads to semidefinite programming problems yielding stable solutions to overdetermined systems of linear equations affected by both data uncertainty and implementation errors, as evidenced by numerical examples from stochastic signal modeling. © 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Multipath channel identification by using global optimization in ambiguity function domain

Cataloged from PDF version of article.A new transform domain array signal processing technique is proposed for identification of multipath communication channels. The received array element outputs are transformed to delay-Doppler domain by using the cross-ambiguity function (CAF) for efficient exploitation of the delay-Doppler diversity of the multipath components. Clusters of multipath components can be identified by using a simple amplitude thresholding in the delay-Doppler domain. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) can be used to identify parameters of the multipath components in each cluster. The performance of the proposed PSO-CAF technique is compared with the space alternating generalized expectation maximization (SAGE) technique and with a recently proposed PSO based technique at various SNR levels. Simulation results clearly quantify the superior performance of the PSO-CAF technique over the alternative techniques at all practically significant SNR levels. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved