In this paper, the trade-off between the quantization noise and the dynamic range of ADCs used to acquire radar signals is revisited using the Unlimited Sensing Framework (USF) in a practical setting. Trade-offs between saturation and resolution arise in many applications, like radar, where sensors acquire signals which exhibit a high degree of variability in amplitude. To solve this issue, we propose the use of the co-design approach of the USF which acquires folded version of the signal of interest and leverages its structure to reconstruct it after its acquisition. We demonstrate that this method outperforms other standard acquisition methods for Doppler radars. We show this theoretically by providing mathematical insights on why the perfect reconstruction of Doppler signals from their folded measurements is possible. Our findings are corroborated via numerical simulations. Taking our theory all the way to practice, we develop a prototype USF-enabled Doppler Radar and show the clear benefits of our method. In each experiment, we show that using the USF increases sensitivity compared to a classic acquisition approach.

In this paper, we investigate the application of continuous sparse signal reconstruction algorithms for the estimation of the ranges and speeds of multiple moving targets using an FMCW radar. Conventionally, to be reconstructed, continuous sparse signals are approximated by a discrete representation. This discretization of the signal’s parameter domain leads to mismatches with the actual signal. While increasing the grid density mitigates these errors, it dramatically increases the algorithmic complexity of the reconstruction. To overcome this issue, we propose a fast greedy algorithm for off-the-grid detection of multiple moving targets. This algorithm extends existing continuous greedy algorithms to the framework of factorized sparse representations of the signals. This factorized representation is obtained from simplifications of the radar signal model which, up to a model mismatch, strongly reduces the dimensionality of the problem. Monte-Carlo simulations of a K-band radar system validate the ability of our method to produce more accurate estimations with less computation time than the on-the-grid methods and than methods based on non-factorized representations.

We consider the question of estimating a real low-complexity signal (such as a sparse vector or a low-rank matrix) from the phase of complex random measurements. We show that in this phase-only compressive sensing (PO-CS) scenario, we can perfectly recover such a signal with high probability and up to global unknown amplitude if the sensing matrix is a complex Gaussian random matrix and the number of measurements is large compared to the complexity level of the signal space. Our approach proceeds by recasting the (non-linear) PO-CS scheme as a linear compressive sensing model built from a signal normalization constraint, and a phase-consistency constraint imposing any signal estimate to match the observed phases in the measurement domain. Practically, stable and robust estimation of the signal direction is achieved from any instance optimal algorithm of the compressive sensing literature (such as basis pursuit denoising). This is ensured by proving that the matrix associated with this equivalent linear model satisfies with high probability the restricted isometry property under the above condition on the number of measurements. We finally observe experimentally that robust signal direction recovery is reached at about twice the number of measurements needed for signal recovery in compressive sensing.

This letter analyzes the performances of a simple reconstruction method, namely the Projected Back-Projection (PBP), for estimating the direction of a sparse signal from its phase-only (or amplitude-less) complex Gaussian random measurements, i.e., an extension of one-bit compressive sensing to the complex field. To study the performances of this algorithm, we show that complex Gaussian random matrices respect, with high probability, a variant of the Restricted Isometry Property (RIP) relating to the ℓ1-norm of the sparse signal measurements to their ℓ2-norm. This property allows us to upper-bound the reconstruction error of PBP in the presence of phase noise. Monte Carlo simulations are performed to highlight the performance of our approach in this phase-only acquisition model when compared to error achieved by PBP in classical compressive sensing.