Abstract: In this talk, we  investigate  a  trade-off  between  the  number  of  radar  observations  (or  measurements)  and  their  resolution  in the  context  of  radar  range  estimation. To this end, we  introduce  a  novel  estimation  scheme  that  can  deal  with  strongly  quantized received signals, going as low as 1-bit per signal sample. We leverage for this a dithered quantized compressive sensing framework that  can  be  applied  to  classic  radar  processing and hardware. This allows us to remove  ambiguous  scenarios  prohibiting  correct range estimation from (undithered) quantized base-band radar signal. Two range estimation algorithms are presented: Projected Back Projection (PBP) and Quantized Iterative Hard Thresholding (QIHT). The effectiveness of the reconstruction methods combined with the dithering strategy is shown through Monte Carlo simulations. Furthermore we show that: (i), in dithered quantization, the accuracy of target range estimation improves when the bit-rate ( i.e., the total number of measured bits) increases, whereas the accuracy of other undithered schemes saturate in this case; and (ii), for fixed, low bit-rate scenarios, severely quantized dithered schemes exhibit better  performances  than  their  full  resolution  counterparts.  These  observations  are  confirmed  using  real  measurements  obtained  in a controlled environment, demonstrating the feasibility of the method in real ranging applications.

Bio: 

Thomas is a Ph.D. student at UCLouvain, Belgium, working in the Electrical Engineering department. He is currently developing compressive sensing (CS) methods for radar applications under the supervision of Prof. Luc Vandendorpe and working closely with Prof. Laurent Jacques. Since 2017, his research is focused on leveraging quantized CS for the design of highly quantized radar sensing methods, such as 1-bit acquisition systems for frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar measurements. The emphasis of his work is on the practicality and accuracy of these schemes through simulations and actual measurements performed in  laboratories.

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