We explore applying group theory principles in designing waveforms for a cognitive radar. By leveraging affine groups, we provide a mathematical framework for designing radar waveforms for a wideband multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar. Prior works in this area have considered this approach for the narrowband or single-antenna radar systems. We first derive a general wideband ambiguity function of a MIMO radar by correlating the signal with its time-dilated, Doppler-shifted, and position-delayed replicas. The ambiguity function is essentially a coefficient function of the unitary representation of an affine group. We then construct complementary waveforms that minimize range sidelobes in the cross-ambiguity matrix, depending on the requirements of cognitive radar. Our numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of group-theory-based complementary waveform designs.

Compressive covariance estimation has arisen as a class of techniques whose aim is to obtain second-order statistics of stochastic processes from compressive measurements. Recently, these methods have been used in various image processing and communications applications, including denoising, spectrum sensing, and compression. Notice that estimating the covariance matrix from compressive samples leads to ill-posed minimizations with severe performance loss at high compression rates. In this regard, a regularization term is typically aggregated to the cost function to consider prior information about a particular property of the covariance matrix. Hence, this paper proposes an algorithm based on the projected gradient method to recover low-rank or Toeplitz approximations of the covariance matrix from compressive measurements. The proposed algorithm divides the compressive measurements into data subsets projected onto different subspaces and accurately estimates the covariance matrix by solving a single optimization problem assuming that each data subset contains an approximation of the signal statistics. Furthermore, gradient filtering is included at every iteration of the proposed algorithm to minimize the estimation error. The error induced by the proposed splitting approach is analytically derived along with the convergence guarantees of the proposed method. The proposed algorithm estimates the covariance matrix of hyperspectral images from synthetic and real compressive samples. Extensive simulations show that the proposed algorithm can effectively recover the covariance matrix of hyperspectral images from compressive measurements with high compression ratios ( 8-15% approx) in noisy scenarios. Moreover, simulations and theoretical results show that the filtering step reduces the recovery error up to twice the number of eigenvectors. Finally, an optical implementation is proposed, and real measurements are used to validate the theoretical findings.

Compressive covariance sampling (CCS) theory aims to recover the covariance matrix (CM) of a signal, instead of the signal itself, from a reduced set of random linear projections. Although several theoretical works demonstrate the CCS theory’s advantages in compressive spectral imaging tasks, a real optical implementation has no been proposed. Therefore, this paper proposes a compressive spectral sensing protocol for the dual-dispersive coded aperture spectral snapshot imager (DD-CASSI) to directly estimate the covariance matrix of the signal. Specifically, we propose a coded aperture design that allows recasting the vector sensing problem into matrix form, which enables to exploit the covariance matrix structure such as positive-semidefiniteness, low-rank, or Toeplitz. Additionally, a low-rank approximation of the image is reconstructed using a Principal Components Analysis (PCA) based method. In order to test the precision of the reconstruction, some spectral signatures of the image are captured with a spectrometer and compared with those obtained in the reconstruction using the covariance matrix. Results show the reconstructed spectrum is accurate with a spectral angle mapper (SAM) of less than 14°. RGB image composites of the spectral image also provide evidence of a correct color reconstruction.

Compressive spectral imaging (CSI) is a framework that captures coded-and-multiplexed low-dimensional projections of spectral data-cubes. In general, the sensing process in many CSI architectures is described using binary matrices, so-called sensing/projection matrices, whose elements can be either random or designed. However, some characteristics of the spectral data, such as the ℓ2-norm or the second moment statistics, can be lost when this dimensionality reduction is performed. Similarly, principal component analysis (PCA) is a data dimensionality reduction technique that minimizes the least-squared error between the spectral data and its low-dimensional projection, but preserving its structure or variance. Thus, PCA can be used to guide the CSI acquisition process by designing the binary sensing matrix. Nonetheless, PCA requires to know the spectral image a-priori, and also, its associated projection matrix is not binary, as required by CSI optical architectures. Therefore, in this paper, an algorithm to design CSI sensing matrices by exploiting the structure-preserving property of the PCA projection is proposed. First, a set of compressive measurements obtained with random sensing matrices is used to rapidly estimate the covariance matrix associated with the spectral data. Then, a new sensing matrix is designed by solving a non-convex optimization problem that finds a set of binary vectors that approximate the principal components of the covariance matrix, thus maximizing the explanation of the data variance. Experimental results show an improvement of up to 3 dB in image reconstruction quality, in terms of the peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), when the binary PCA-based sensing matrices are used and compared with conventional random sensing matrices and state-of-art designed matrices based on PCA.