IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing

Automotive imaging radars require high angular resolution which can be achieved by a large antenna aperture. In order to obey Nyquist spatial sampling rate, a large number of array elements and receive channels is required. In practice, this solution results in a prohibitively high cost and complexity. 

We propose a high-resolution imaging radar system to enable high-fidelity four-dimensional (4D) sensing for autonomous driving, i.e., range, Doppler, azimuth, and elevation, through a joint sparsity design in frequency spectrum and array configurations. To accommodate a high number of automotive radars operating at the same frequency band while avoiding mutual interference, random sparse step-frequency waveform (RSSFW) is proposed to synthesize a large effective bandwidth to achieve high range resolution profiles.

Automotive radar is used in many applications of advanced driver assistance systems and is considered as one of the key technologies for highly automated driving. An overview of state-of-the-art signal processing in automotive radar is presented along with current research directions and practical challenges.

Optimal rank selection is an important issue in tensor decomposition problems, especially for Tensor Train (TT) and Tensor Ring (TR) (also known as Tensor Chain) decompositions. In this paper, a new rank selection method for TR decomposition has been proposed for automatically finding near-optimal TR ranks, which result in a lower storage cost, especially for tensors with inexact TT or TR structures.

The emergence of big data and the multidimensional nature of wireless communication signals present significant opportunities for exploiting the versatility of tensor decompositions in associated data analysis and signal processing. The uniqueness of tensor decompositions, unlike matrix-based methods, can be guaranteed under very mild and natural conditions. 

The papers in this special section focus on tensor decomposition for signal processing and machine learning. Tensor decomposition, also called tensor factorization, is useful for representing and analyzing multi-dimensional data. Tensor decompositions have been applied in signal processing applications (speech, acoustics, communications, radar, biomedicine), machine learning (clustering, dimensionality reduction, latent factor models, subspace learning), and well beyond.

Image restoration remains a challenging task in image processing. Numerous methods tackle this problem, which is often solved by minimizing a nonsmooth penalized co-log-likelihood function. Although the solution is easily interpretable with theoretic guarantees, its estimation relies on an optimization process that can take time. Considering the research effort in deep learning for image classification and segmentation, this class of methods offers a serious alternative to perform image restoration but stays challenging to solve inverse problems.

Image restoration is a critical component of image processing pipelines and for low-level computer vision tasks. Conventional image restoration approaches are mostly based on hand-crafted image priors. The inter-channel correlation of color images is not fully exploited. Motivated by the special characteristics of the inter-channel correlation (higher correlation for red/green and green/blue channels than for red/blue) in color images and general characteristics (green channel always shows the best image quality among the three color components) of distorted color images, in this paper, a three-stage convolutional neural network (CNN) structure is proposed for color image restoration tasks.