Speaker: Zai Yang

Affiliation: Xi'an Jiaotong University

Academic title: Professor

Honorary title: NSFC Excellent Youth Science Foundation

Abstract:

A recent trend of research on direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation is to localize more sources than sensors with a proper sparse array. A key assumption of algorithm design is that the sources are uncorrelated and an additional assumption for theoretical performance analysis is that the number of snapshots approaches infinity. Differently from existing studies, this talk is concerned about two challenging problems: 1) theoretical performance analysis with finite snapshots and finite SNR, and 2) robust algorithms that can work in practical multipath environments. Regarding Problem 1, we derive the error bound of the prominent direct-augmentation and spatial-smoothing ESPRIT algorithms with finite snapshots and finite SNR. Regarding Problem 2, we propose a maximum-likelihood DOA estimation algorithm, called MESA, that is shown to be able to efficiently localize more uncorrelated sources than sensors and meanwhile be robust to correlated and coherent sources. Future research directions will also be highlighted.

Biography:

Zai YANG is a Professor of the School of Mathematics and Statistics, Xi’an Jiaotong University, China. He received the B.Sc. degree in mathematics and M.Sc. degree in applied mathematics from Sun Yat-sen (Zhongshan) University, China, in 2007 and 2009 respectively, and the Ph.D degree in electrical and electronic engineering from Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, in 2014. His research interest is focused on mathematics of signal processing and wireless communications, especially on designing convex and nonconvex optimization algorithms with theoretical guarantees and developing mathematical tools for array signal processing, spectral analysis and wireless channel estimation. He was a leading tutorial presenter at EUSIPCO 2017. He is an IEEE senior member and a member of the Sensor Array and Multichannel (SAM) Technical Committee (TC) of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (2023-2025). He is serving as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing and on the editorial board of Signal Processing (Elsevier). He was awarded the NSFC Excellent Youth Science Foundation Grant in 2019.