A MARL Based Multi-Target Tracking Algorithm Under Jamming Against Radar

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have played an increasingly important role in military operations and social life. Among all application scenarios, multi-target tracking tasks accomplished by UAV swarms have received extensive attention. However, when UAVs use radar to track targets, the tracking performance can be severely compromised by jammers. To track targets in the presence of jammers, UAVs can use passive radar to position the jammer. This paper proposes a system where a UAV swarm selects the radar's active or passive work mode to track multiple differently located and potentially jammer-carrying targets. After presenting the optimization problem and proving its solving difficulty, we use a multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm to solve this control problem. We also propose a mechanism based on simulated annealing algorithm to avoid cases where UAV actions violate constraints. Simulation experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Approximating Multi-Dimensional and Multiband Signals

We study the problem of representing a discrete tensor that comes from finite uniform samplings of a multi-dimensional and multiband analog signal. Particularly, we consider two typical cases in which the shape of the subbands is cubic or parallelepipedic. For the cubic case, by examining the spectrum of its corresponding time- and band-limited operators, we obtain a low-dimensional optimal dictionary to represent the original tensor. We further prove that the optimal dictionary can be approximated by the famous \ac{dpss} with certain modulation, leading to an efficient constructing method. For the parallelepipedic case, we show that there also exists a low-dimensional dictionary to represent the original tensor. We present rigorous proof that the numbers of atoms in both dictionaries are approximately equal to the dot of the total number of samplings and the total volume of the subbands. Our derivations are mainly focused on the \ac{2d} scenarios but can be naturally extended to high dimensions.

RadarMOSEVE: A Spatial-Temporal Transformer Network for Radar-Only Moving Object Segmentation and Ego-Velocity Estimation

Moving object segmentation (MOS) and Ego velocity estimation (EVE) are vital capabilities for mobile systems to achieve full autonomy. Several approaches have attempted to achieve MOSEVE using a LiDAR sensor. However, LiDAR sensors are typically expensive and susceptible to adverse weather conditions. Instead, millimeter-wave radar (MWR) has gained popularity in robotics and autonomous driving for real applications due to its cost-effectiveness and resilience to bad weather. Nonetheless, publicly available MOSEVE datasets and approaches using radar data are limited. Some existing methods adopt point convolutional networks from LiDAR-based approaches, ignoring the specific artifacts and the valuable radial velocity information of radar measurements, leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a novel transformer network that effectively addresses the sparsity and noise issues and leverages the radial velocity measurements of radar points using our devised radar self- and cross-attention mechanisms. Based on that, our method achieves accurate EVE of the robot and performs MOS using only radar data simultaneously. To thoroughly evaluate the MOSEVE performance of our method, we annotated the radar points in the public View-of-Delft (VoD) dataset and additionally constructed a new radar dataset in various environments. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/ORCA-Uboat/RadarMOSEVE.

Compressed Sensing Radar Detectors based on Weighted LASSO

The compressed sensing (CS) model can represent the signal recovery process of a large number of radar systems. The detection problem of such radar systems has been studied in many pieces of literature through the technology of debiased least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO). While naive LASSO treats all the entries equally, there are many applications in which prior information varies depending on each entry. Weighted LASSO, in which the weights of the regularization terms are tuned depending on the entry-dependent prior, is proven to be more effective with the prior information by many researchers. In the present paper, existing results obtained by methods of statistical mechanics are utilized to derive the debiased weighted LASSO estimator for randomly constructed row-orthogonal measurement matrices. Based on this estimator, we construct a detector, termed the debiased weighted LASSO detector (DWLD), for CS radar systems and prove its advantages. The threshold of this detector can be calculated by false alarm rate, which yields better detection performance than the naive weighted LASSO detector (NWLD) under the Neyman-Pearson principle. The improvement of the detection performance brought by tuning weights is demonstrated by numerical experiments. With the same false alarm rate, the detection probability of DWLD is obviously higher than those of NWLD and the debiased (non-weighted) LASSO detector (DLD).

Near Field Computational Imaging with RIS Generated Virtual Masks

Near field computational imaging has been recognized as a promising technique for non-destructive and highly accurate detection of the target. Meanwhile, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) can flexibly control the scattered electromagnetic (EM) fields for sensing the target and can thus help computational imaging in the near field. In this paper, we propose a near-field imaging scheme based on holograghic aperture RIS. Specifically, we first establish an end-to-end EM propagation model from the perspective of Maxwell equations. To mitigate the inherent ill conditioning of the inverse problem in the imaging system, we design the EM field patterns as masks that help translate the inverse problem into a forward problem. Next, we utilize RIS to generate different virtual EM masks on the target surface and calculate the cross-correlation between the mask patterns and the electric field strength at the receiver. We then provide a RIS design scheme for virtual EM masks by employing a regularization technique. The cross-range resolution of the proposed method is analyzed based on the spatial spectrum of the generated masks. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve high-quality imaging. Moreover, the imaging quality can be improved by generating more virtual EM masks, by increasing the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the receiver, or by placing the target closer to the RIS.

a cognitive frequency allocation strategy for multi-carrier radar against communication interference

Modern radars often adopt multi-carrier waveform which has been widely discussed in the literature. However, with the development of civil communication, more and more spectrum resource has been occupied by communication networks. Thus, avoiding the interference from communication users is an important and challenging task for the application of multi-carrier radar. In this paper, a novel frequency allocation strategy based on the historical experiences is proposed, which is formulated as a Markov decision process (MDP). In a decision step, the multi-carrier radar needs to choose more than one frequencies, leading to a combinatorial action space. To address this challenge, we use a novel iteratively selecting technique which breaks a difficult decision task into several easy tasks. Moreover, an efficient deep reinforcement learning algorithm is adopted to handle the complicated spectrum dynamics. Numerical results show that our proposed method outperforms the existing ones.

Direction Finding in Partly Calibrated Arrays Exploiting the Whole Array Aperture

We consider the problem of direction finding using partly calibrated arrays, a distributed subarray with position errors between subarrays. The key challenge is to enhance angular resolution in the presence of position errors. To achieve this goal, existing algorithms, such as subspace separation and sparse recovery, have to rely on multiple snapshots, which increases the burden of data transmission and the processing delay. Therefore, we aim to enhance angular resolution using only a single snapshot. To this end, we exploit the orthogonality of the signals of partly calibrated arrays. Particularly, we transform the signal model into a special multiple-measurement model, show that there is approximate orthogonality between the source signals in this model, and then use blind source separation to exploit the orthogonality. Simulation and experiment results both verify that our proposed algorithm achieves high angular resolution as distributed arrays without position errors, inversely proportional to the whole array aperture.

Towards a performance bound on MIMO DFRC systems

It is a fundamental problem to analyse the performance bound of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) dual-functional radar-communication (DFRC) systems. To this end, we derive a performance bound on the communication function under a constraint on radar performance. To facilitate the analysis, we consider a toy example, in which there is only one down-link user with a single receive antenna and one radar target. In such a simplified case, we obtain an analytical expression for the performance bound and the corresponding waveform design strategy to achieve the bound. The results reveal a tradeoff between communication and radar performance, and a condition when the transmitted energy can be shared between these two functions.

Compressed sensing radar detectors under the row-orthogonal design model: a statistical mechanics perspective

Compressed sensing (CS) model of complex-valued data can represent the signal recovery process of a large amount types of radar systems, especially when the measurement matrix is row-orthogonal. Based on debiased least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO), detection problem under Gaussian random design model, i.e. the elements of measurement matrix are drawn from Gaussian distribution, is studied by literature. However, we find that these approaches are not suitable for row-orthogonal measurement matrices, which are of more practical relevance. In view of statistical mechanics approaches, we provide derivations of more accurate test statistics and thresholds (or p-values) under the row-orthogonal design model, and theoretically analyze the detection performance of the present detector. Such detector can analytically provide the threshold according to given false alarm rate, which is not possible with the conventional CS detector, and the detection performance is proved to be better than that of the traditional LASSO detector. Comparing with other debiased LASSO based detectors, simulation results indicate that the proposed approach can achieve more accurate probability of false alarm when the measurement matrix is row-orthogonal, leading to better detection performance under Neyman-Pearson principle.

Theoretical Linear Convergence of Deep Unfolding Network for Block-Sparse Signal Recovery

In this paper, we consider the recovery of the high-dimensional block-sparse signal from a compressed set of measurements, where the non-zero coefficients of the recovered signal occur in a small number of blocks. Adopting the idea of deep unfolding, we explore the block-sparse structure and put forward a block-sparse reconstruction network named Ada-BlockLISTA, which performs gradient descent on every single block followed by a block-wise shrinkage. Furthermore, we prove the linear convergence rate of our proposed network, which also theoretically guarantees exact recovery for a potentially higher sparsity level based on underlyingblock structure. Numerical results indicate that Ada-BlockLISTA yields better signal recovery performance compared with existing algorithms, which ignore the additional block structure in the signal model.