Highly Constrained Coded Aperture Imaging Systems Design Via a Knowledge Distillation Approach

Computational optical imaging (COI) systems have enabled the acquisition of high-dimensional signals through optical coding elements (OCEs). OCEs encode the high-dimensional signal in one or more snapshots, which are subsequently decoded using computational algorithms. Currently, COI systems are optimized through an end-to-end (E2E) approach, where the OCEs are modeled as a layer of a neural network and the remaining layers perform a specific imaging task. However, the performance of COI systems optimized through E2E is limited by the physical constraints imposed by these systems. This paper proposes a knowledge distillation (KD) framework for the design of highly physically constrained COI systems. This approach employs the KD methodology, which consists of a teacher-student relationship, where a high-performance, unconstrained COI system (the teacher), guides the optimization of a physically constrained system (the student) characterized by a limited number of snapshots. We validate the proposed approach, using a binary coded apertures single pixel camera for monochromatic and multispectral image reconstruction. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the KD scheme over traditional E2E optimization for the designing of highly physically constrained COI systems.

Learning Point Spread Function Invertibility Assessment for Image Deconvolution

Deep-learning (DL)-based image deconvolution (ID) has exhibited remarkable recovery performance, surpassing traditional linear methods. However, unlike traditional ID approaches that rely on analytical properties of the point spread function (PSF) to achieve high recovery performance - such as specific spectrum properties or small conditional numbers in the convolution matrix - DL techniques lack quantifiable metrics for evaluating PSF suitability for DL-assisted recovery. Aiming to enhance deconvolution quality, we propose a metric that employs a non-linear approach to learn the invertibility of an arbitrary PSF using a neural network by mapping it to a unit impulse. A lower discrepancy between the mapped PSF and a unit impulse indicates a higher likelihood of successful inversion by a DL network. Our findings reveal that this metric correlates with high recovery performance in DL and traditional methods, thereby serving as an effective regularizer in deconvolution tasks. This approach reduces the computational complexity over conventional condition number assessments and is a differentiable process. These useful properties allow its application in designing diffractive optical elements through end-to-end (E2E) optimization, achieving invertible PSFs, and outperforming the E2E baseline framework.

Factor Graph Processing for Dual-Blind Deconvolution at ISAC Receiver

Integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) systems have gained significant interest because of their ability to jointly and efficiently access, utilize, and manage the scarce electromagnetic spectrum. The co-existence approach toward ISAC focuses on the receiver processing of overlaid radar and communications signals coming from independent transmitters. A specific ISAC coexistence problem is dual-blind deconvolution (DBD), wherein the transmit signals and channels of both radar and communications are unknown to the receiver. Prior DBD works ignore the evolution of the signal model over time. In this work, we consider a dynamic DBD scenario using a linear state space model (LSSM) such that, apart from the transmit signals and channels of both systems, the LSSM parameters are also unknown. We employ a factor graph representation to model these unknown variables. We avoid the conventional matrix inversion approach to estimate the unknown variables by using an efficient expectation-maximization algorithm, where each iteration employs a Gaussian message passing over the factor graph structure. Numerical experiments demonstrate the accurate estimation of radar and communications channels, including in the presence of noise.

An Invitation to Hypercomplex Phase Retrieval: Theory and Applications

Hypercomplex signal processing (HSP) provides state-of-the-art tools to handle multidimensional signals by harnessing intrinsic correlation of the signal dimensions through Clifford algebra. Recently, the hypercomplex representation of the phase retrieval (PR) problem, wherein a complex-valued signal is estimated through its intensity-only projections, has attracted significant interest. The hypercomplex PR (HPR) arises in many optical imaging and computational sensing applications that usually comprise quaternion and octonion-valued signals. Analogous to the traditional PR, measurements in HPR may involve complex, hypercomplex, Fourier, and other sensing matrices. This set of problems opens opportunities for developing novel HSP tools and algorithms. This article provides a synopsis of the emerging areas and applications of HPR with a focus on optical imaging.

Octonion Phase Retrieval

Signal processing over hypercomplex numbers arises in many optical imaging applications. In particular, spectral image or color stereo data are often processed using octonion algebra. Recently, the eight-band multispectral image phase recovery has gained salience, wherein it is desired to recover the eight bands from the phaseless measurements. In this paper, we tackle this hitherto unaddressed hypercomplex variant of the popular phase retrieval (PR) problem. We propose octonion Wirtinger flow (OWF) to recover an octonion signal from its intensity-only observation. However, contrary to the complex-valued Wirtinger flow, the non-associative nature of octonion algebra and the consequent lack of octonion derivatives make the extension to OWF non-trivial. We resolve this using the pseudo-real-matrix representation of octonion to perform the derivatives in each OWF update. We demonstrate that our approach recovers the octonion signal up to a right-octonion phase factor. Numerical experiments validate OWF-based PR with high accuracy under both noiseless and noisy measurements.

LD-GAN: Low-Dimensional Generative Adversarial Network for Spectral Image Generation with Variance Regularization

Deep learning methods are state-of-the-art for spectral image (SI) computational tasks. However, these methods are constrained in their performance since available datasets are limited due to the highly expensive and long acquisition time. Usually, data augmentation techniques are employed to mitigate the lack of data. Surpassing classical augmentation methods, such as geometric transformations, GANs enable diverse augmentation by learning and sampling from the data distribution. Nevertheless, GAN-based SI generation is challenging since the high-dimensionality nature of this kind of data hinders the convergence of the GAN training yielding to suboptimal generation. To surmount this limitation, we propose low-dimensional GAN (LD-GAN), where we train the GAN employing a low-dimensional representation of the {dataset} with the latent space of a pretrained autoencoder network. Thus, we generate new low-dimensional samples which are then mapped to the SI dimension with the pretrained decoder network. Besides, we propose a statistical regularization to control the low-dimensional representation variance for the autoencoder training and to achieve high diversity of samples generated with the GAN. We validate our method LD-GAN as data augmentation strategy for compressive spectral imaging, SI super-resolution, and RBG to spectral tasks with improvements varying from 0.5 to 1 [dB] in each task respectively. We perform comparisons against the non-data augmentation training, traditional DA, and with the same GAN adjusted and trained to generate the full-sized SIs. The code of this paper can be found in https://github.com/romanjacome99/LD_GAN.git

Multi-Antenna Dual-Blind Deconvolution for Joint Radar-Communications via SoMAN Minimization

Joint radar-communications (JRC) has emerged as a promising technology for efficiently using the limited electromagnetic spectrum. In JRC applications such as secure military receivers, often the radar and communications signals are overlaid in the received signal. In these passive listening outposts, the signals and channels of both radar and communications are unknown to the receiver. The ill-posed problem of recovering all signal and channel parameters from the overlaid signal is terms as dual-blind deconvolution (DBD). In this work, we investigate a more challenging version of DBD with a multi-antenna receiver. We model the radar and communications channels with a few (sparse) continuous-valued parameters such as time delays, Doppler velocities, and directions-of-arrival (DoAs). To solve this highly ill-posed DBD, we propose to minimize the sum of multivariate atomic norms (SoMAN) that depends on the unknown parameters. To this end, we devise an exact semidefinite program using theories of positive hyperoctant trigonometric polynomials (PhTP). Our theoretical analyses show that the minimum number of samples and antennas required for perfect recovery is logarithmically dependent on the maximum of the number of radar targets and communications paths rather than their sum. We show that our approach is easily generalized to include several practical issues such as gain/phase errors and additive noise. Numerical experiments show the exact parameter recovery for different JRC

Multi-dimensional dual-blind deconvolution approach toward joint radar-communications

We consider a joint multiple-antenna radar-communications system in a co-existence scenario. Contrary to conventional applications, wherein at least the radar waveform and communications channel are known or estimated \textit{a priori}, we investigate the case when the channels and transmit signals of both systems are unknown. In radar applications, this problem arises in multistatic or passive systems, where transmit signal is not known. Similarly, highly dynamic vehicular or mobile communications may render prior estimates of wireless channel unhelpful. In particular, the radar signal reflected-off multiple targets is overlaid with the multi-carrier communications signal. In order to extract the unknown continuous-valued target parameters (range, Doppler velocity, and direction-of-arrival) and communications messages, we formulate the problem as a sparse dual-blind deconvolution and solve it using atomic norm minimization. Numerical experiments validate our proposed approach and show that precise estimation of continuous-valued channel parameters, radar waveform, and communications messages is possible up to scaling ambiguities.

D$^\text{2}$UF: Deep Coded Aperture Design and Unrolling Algorithm for Compressive Spectral Image Fusion

Compressive spectral imaging (CSI) has attracted significant attention since it employs synthetic apertures to codify spatial and spectral information, sensing only 2D projections of the 3D spectral image. However, these optical architectures suffer from a trade-off between the spatial and spectral resolution of the reconstructed image due to technology limitations. To overcome this issue, compressive spectral image fusion (CSIF) employs the projected measurements of two CSI architectures with different resolutions to estimate a high-spatial high-spectral resolution. This work presents the fusion of the compressive measurements of a low-spatial high-spectral resolution coded aperture snapshot spectral imager (CASSI) architecture and a high-spatial low-spectral resolution multispectral color filter array (MCFA) system. Unlike previous CSIF works, this paper proposes joint optimization of the sensing architectures and a reconstruction network in an end-to-end (E2E) manner. The trainable optical parameters are the coded aperture (CA) in the CASSI and the colored coded aperture in the MCFA system, employing a sigmoid activation function and regularization function to encourage binary values on the trainable variables for an implementation purpose. Additionally, an unrolling-based network inspired by the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) optimization is formulated to address the reconstruction step and the acquisition systems design jointly. Finally, a spatial-spectral inspired loss function is employed at the end of each unrolling layer to increase the convergence of the unrolling network. The proposed method outperforms previous CSIF methods, and experimental results validate the method with real measurements.

Joint Radar-Communications Processing from a Dual-Blind Deconvolution Perspective

We consider a general spectral coexistence scenario, wherein the channels and transmit signals of both radar and communications systems are unknown at the receiver. In this \textit{dual-blind deconvolution} (DBD) problem, a common receiver admits the multi-carrier wireless communications signal that is overlaid with the radar signal reflected-off multiple targets. When the radar receiver is not collocated with the transmitter, such as in passive or multistatic radars, the transmitted signal is also unknown apart from the target parameters. Similarly, apart from the transmitted messages, the communications channel may also be unknown in dynamic environments such as vehicular networks. As a result, the estimation of unknown target and communications parameters in a DBD scenario is highly challenging. In this work, we exploit the sparsity of the channel to solve DBD by casting it as an atomic norm minimization problem. Our theoretical analyses and numerical experiments demonstrate perfect recovery of continuous-valued range-time and Doppler velocities of multiple targets as well as delay-Doppler communications channel parameters using uniformly-spaced time samples in the dual-blind receiver.