SPS Webinar: Twenty-Five Years of Sensor Array and Multichannel Signal Processing

Date: 11 July 2023
Time: 9:30 AM ET (New York Time)
Speaker(s): Dr. Wei Liu

Abstract

In this talk, a review of the advances made in the past twenty-five years in sensor array and multichannel signal processing (SAM) is first presented. As it is not possible to give an exhaustive list for all of them, we will focus on five major topics and introduce the corresponding progresses made in tackling their respective technical challenges: beamforming (including robust adaptive beamforming and frequency invariant beamforming), direction of arrival (DOA) estimation (including sparsity based and underdetermined DOA estimation), sensor location optimization, target/source localization based on sensor arrays, and multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) arrays (including MIMO radar and MIMO for wireless communications). The first two are classic SAM topics from the very beginning of SAM research, while the latter three were only studied systematically in the past decades. Then, six new developments in the SAM area are introduced to give an indication about possible future research directions, including graph signal processing for sensor networks, tensor-based array signal processing, quaternion valued array signal processing, one-bit and non-coherent sensor array signal processing, machine learning and artificial intelligence for sensor arrays, and array signal processing for next-generation communication systems.

Biography

Wei Liu (S'01-M'04-SM'10) received the B.Sc. and LLB degrees from Peking University in 1996 and 1997, respectively, the M. Phil from University of Hong Kong in 2000, and the Ph.D. from University of Southampton, UK, in 2003. He then worked as a postdoc first at Southampton and later at Imperial College London. 

He has been with the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University of Sheffield, UK, since September 2005, first as a Lecturer and then a Senior Lecturer. He has published 390+ journal and conference papers, five book chapters, and two research monographs titled ``Wideband Beamforming: Concepts and Techniques'' (Wiley, March 2010) and ``Low-Cost Smart Antennas'' (Wiley, March 2019), respectively. His research interests cover a wide range of topics in signal processing, with a focus on sensor array signal processing and its various applications, such as radar, sonar, wireless communications, robotics and autonomous systems.

Dr. Liu is a member of the Digital Signal Processing Technical Committee of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (Chair for 2022-2024) and the Sensor Array and Multichannel Signal Processing Technical Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (Chair for 2021-2022). He was an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (2015-2019), IEEE Access (2016-2021), and Journal of the Franklin Institute (2021-2023), and is currently an editorial board member of Frontiers of Information Technology and Electronic Engineering (from 2016 and Executive Associate Editor-in-Chief for 2023-2026). He is also an IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society Distinguished Lecturer for 2023–2024.