George Papanicolaou

Liliana Borcea, Thomas Callaghan, George Papanicolaou

We consider the problem of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging and motion estimation of complex scenes. By complex we mean scenes with multiple targets, stationary and in motion. We use the usual setup with one moving antenna emitting and receiving signals. We address two challenges: (1) the detection of moving targets in the complex scene and (2) the separation of the echoes from the stationary targets and those from the moving targets. Such separation allows high resolution imaging of the stationary scene and motion estimation with the echoes from the moving targets alone. We show that the robust principal component analysis (PCA) method which decomposes a matrix in two parts, one low rank and one sparse, can be used for motion detection and data separation. The matrix that is decomposed is the pulse and range compressed SAR data indexed by two discrete time variables: the slow time, which parametrizes the location of the antenna, and the fast time, which parametrizes the echoes received between successive emissions from the antenna. We present an analysis of the rank of the data matrix to motivate the use of the robust PCA method. We also show with numerical simulations that successful data separation with robust PCA requires proper data windowing. Results of motion estimation and imaging with the separated data are presented, as well.

Miguel Moscoso, Alexei Novikov, George Papanicolaou et al.

We present a novel approach for recovering a sparse signal from cross-correlated data. Cross-correlations naturally arise in many fields of imaging, such as optics, holography and seismic interferometry. Compared to the sparse signal recovery problem that uses linear measurements, the unknown is now a matrix formed by the cross correlation of the unknown signal. Hence, the bottleneck for inversion is the number of unknowns that grows quadratically. The main idea of our proposed approach is to reduce the dimensionality of the problem by recovering only the diagonal of the unknown matrix, whose dimension grows linearly with the size of the problem. The keystone of the methodology is the use of an efficient {\em Noise Collector} that absorbs the data that come from the off-diagonal elements of the unknown matrix and that do not carry extra information about the support of the signal. This results in a linear problem whose cost is similar to the one that uses linear measurements. Our theory shows that the proposed approach provides exact support recovery when the data is not too noisy, and that there are no false positives for any level of noise. Moreover, our theory also demonstrates that when using cross-correlated data, the level of sparsity that can be recovered increases, scaling almost linearly with the number of data. The numerical experiments presented in the paper corroborate these findings.

Miguel Moscoso, Alexei Novikov, George Papanicolaou et al.

The ability to detect sparse signals from noisy high-dimensional data is a top priority in modern science and engineering. A sparse solution of the linear system $A ρ= b_0$ can be found efficiently with an $l_1$-norm minimization approach if the data is noiseless. Detection of the signal's support from data corrupted by noise is still a challenging problem, especially if the level of noise must be estimated. We propose a new efficient approach that does not require any parameter estimation. We introduce the Noise Collector (NC) matrix $C$ and solve an augmented system $A ρ+ C η= b_0 + e$, where $ e$ is the noise. We show that the $l_1$-norm minimal solution of the augmented system has zero false discovery rate for any level of noise and with probability that tends to one as the dimension of $ b_0$ increases to infinity. We also obtain exact support recovery if the noise is not too large, and develop a Fast Noise Collector Algorithm which makes the computational cost of solving the augmented system comparable to that of the original one. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the method in applications to passive array imaging.

Miguel Moscoso, Alexei Novikov, George Papanicolaou et al.

We consider imaging the reflectivity of scatterers from intensity-only data recorded by a single moving transducer that both emits and receives signals, forming a synthetic aperture. By exploiting frequency illumination diversity, we obtain multiple intensity measurements at each location, from which we determine field cross-correlations using an appropriate phase controlled illumination strategy and the inner product polarization identity. The field cross-correlations obtained this way do not, however, provide all the missing phase information because they are determined up to a phase that depends on the receiver's location. The main result of this paper is an algorithm with which we recover the field cross-correlations up to a single phase that is common to all the data measured over the synthetic aperture, so all the data are synchronized. Thus, we can image coherently with data over all frequencies and measurement locations as if full phase information was recorded.