The advent of 6G is expected to enable many use cases which may rely on accurate knowledge of the location and orientation of user equipment (UE). The conventional localization methods suffer from limitations such as synchronization and high power consumption required for multiple active anchors. This can be mitigated by utilizing a large dimensional passive reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS). This paper presents a novel low-complexity approach for the estimation of 5D pose (i.e. 3D location and 2D orientation) of a UE in near-field RIS-assisted multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. The proposed approach exploits the symmetric arrangement of uniform planar array of RIS and uniform linear array of UE to decouple the 5D problem into five 1D sub-problems. Further, we solve these sub-problems using a total least squares ESPRIT inspired approach to obtain closed-form solutions.

We propose a data-driven method for direction-of-arrival (DOA) trajectory estimation. We use a deep complex architecture which leverages complex-valued representations to capture both magnitude and phase information in the received sensor array data. The network is designed to output the DOA trajectory parameters and amplitudes of the strongest source. Deviating from conventional methods, which attempt to estimate parameters for all sources simultaneously – leading to assignment ambiguity and the problem of uncertain output dimensions, we adopt a sequential approach. The estimated source signal contribution is subtracted from the input to obtain a residual signal. This residual signal is then fed back into the network to identify the next strongest source and so on, making the proposed network reusable. We evaluate our network on simulated data of varying complexity. Results demonstrate the feasibility of such a reusable network and potential improvements can be explored in future.

The particle flow Gaussian particle filter (PFGPF) uses an invertible particle flow to generate a proposal density. It approximates the predictive and posterior distributions as Gaussian densities. In this paper, we use a bank of PFGPF filters to construct a Particle flow Gaussian sum particle filter (PFGSPF), which approximates the prediction and posterior as Gaussian mixture model. This approximation is useful in complex estimation problems where a single Gaussian approximation is inadequate. We compare the performance of this proposed filter with the PFGPF and others in challenging numerical simulations.

We propose a data-based joint localization and tracking task called trajectory localization with source trajectories identified for a block (multiple measurements) of array data. This is in contrast to localization tasks where directions of arrival (DOA) are estimated per measurement. We employ parametric motion models with focus on linear trajectories. Deep learning based U-Net architecture is proposed to estimate the linear trajectory parameters. The results show that the proposed method gives better and fast trajectory estimates as compared to the trajectory localization (TL) methods of conventional beamforming (TL-CBF) and sparse Bayesian learning (TL-SBL).

Directions of arrival (DOA) estimation or localization of sources is an important problem in many applications for which numerous algorithms have been proposed. Most localization methods use block-level processing that combines multiple data snapshots to estimate DOA within a block. The DOAs are assumed to be constant within the block duration. However, these assumptions are often violated due to source motion. In this paper, we propose a signal model that captures the linear variations in DOA within a block. We applied conventional beamforming (CBF) algorithm to this model to estimate linear DOA trajectories. Further, we formulate the proposed signal model as a block sparse model and subsequently derive sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) algorithm. Our simulation results show that this linear parametric DOA model and corresponding algorithms capture the DOA trajectories for moving sources more accurately than traditional signal models and methods.

The localization of acoustic sources is a parameter estimation problem where the parameters of interest are the direction of arrivals (DOAs). The DOA estimation problem can be formulated as a sparse parameter estimation problem and solved using compressive sensing (CS) methods. In this paper, the CS method of sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) is used to find the DOAs. We specifically use multi-frequency SBL leading to a non-convex optimization problem, which is solved using fixed-point iterations. We evaluate SBL along with traditional DOA estimation methods of conventional beamforming (CBF) and multiple signal classification (MUSIC) on various source localization tasks from the open access LOCATA dataset. The comparative study shows that SBL significantly outperforms CBF and MUSIC on all the considered tasks.

Sparse arrays such as co-prime and nested arrays can identify more sources than the number of sensors. This is because their difference co-arrays contain a uniformly spaced virtual array with more elements than the number of sensors in the array. In this paper we demonstrate this using two dimensional co-prime and nested sparse arrays combined with sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) for 2D beamforming in azimuth and elevation. SBL can directly process the sparse array data and significantly outperform conventional beam-forming and MUSIC as seen from simulations.

The paper considers direction of arrival (DOA) estimation from long-term observations in a noisy environment. In such an environment the noise source might evolve, causing the stationary models to fail. Therefore a heteroscedastic Gaussian noise model is introduced where the variance can vary across observations and sensors. The source amplitudes are assumed independent zero-mean complex Gaussian distributed with unknown variances (i.e. the source powers), leading to stochastic maximum likelihood (ML) DOA estimation. The DOAs of plane waves are estimated from multi-snapshot sensor array data using sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) where the noise is estimated across both sensors and snapshots. Simulations demonstrate that taking the heteroscedastic noise into account improves DOA estimation.

Sparse Bayesian learning is a sparse processing method used for solving high-dimensional, underdetermined linear equations. Often the sensing matrix in the system of equations is assumed known and in presence of perturbations in this matrix performance of sparse processing degrades. We develop a sparse Bayesian learning method that accounts for perturbations in the sensing matrix. We derive an iterative weight update by performing evidence maximization. Beamforming simulations are used to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method.

The directions of arrival (DOA) of plane waves are estimated from multisnapshot sensor array data using sparse Bayesian learning (SBL). The prior for the source amplitudes is assumed independent zero-mean complex Gaussian distributed with hyperparameters, the unknown variances (i.e., the source powers). For a complex Gaussian likelihood with hyperparameter, the unknown noise variance, the corresponding Gaussian posterior distribution is derived. The hyperparameters are automatically selected by maximizing the evidence and promoting sparse DOA estimates. The SBL scheme for DOA estimation is discussed and evaluated competitively against LASSO (ℓ1-regularization), conventional beamforming, and MUSIC.

Random finite set (RFS) based filters such as the cardinalized probability hypothesis density (CPHD) filter have been successfully applied to the problem of single sensor multitarget tracking. Various multisensor extensions of these filters have been proposed in the literature, but exact update equations for the multisensor CPHD filter have not been identified. In this paper, we provide the update equations and propose an approximate implementation. The exact implementation of the multisensor CPHD filter is infeasible even for very simple scenarios. We develop an algorithm that greedily searches for the most likely groups of measurement subsets. This enables a computationally tractable implementation. Numerical simulations are performed to compare the proposed filter implementation with other random finite set based filters.

Radio-frequency (RF) tomography is the method of tracking targets using received signal-strength (RSS) measurements for RF transmissions between multiple sensor nodes. When the targets are near the line-of-sight path between two nodes, they are more likely to cause substantial attenuation or amplification of the RF signal. In this paper, we develop a measurement model for multitarget tracking using RF tomography in indoor environments and apply it successfully for tracking up to three targets. We compare several multitarget tracking algorithms and examine performance in the two scenarios when the number of targets is 1) known and constant, and 2) unknown and time varying. We demonstrate successful tracking for experimental data collected from sensor networks deployed in three different indoor environments posing different tracking challenges. For the fixed number of targets, the best algorithm achieves a root-mean-squared error tracking accuracy of approximately 0.3 m for a single target, 0.7 m for two targets and 0.8 m for three targets. Tracking using our proposed model is more accurate than tracking using previously proposed observation models; more importantly, the model does not require the same degree of training.