Mr. Saurav Subedi, a research assistant in the Center for Advanced Communications (CAC) and a PhD student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Villanova University, won the second prize Best Student Paper Award at the 2015 IEEE International Radar Conference held in Arlington, VA in May 2015. Titled “Group sparsity based multi-target tracking in multi-static passive radar systems using Doppler-only measurements,” the award-winning paper develops a novel fusion and tracking scheme for Doppler-based multi-target tracking in a multi-static passive radar system exploiting the signal group sparsity available in all bistatic links, and using Kalman filter-based implementation of the Gaussian mixture probability hypothesis density filter for target state estimation. Co-authors for the paper include Saurav’s lead advisor and co-advisor, Research Professor Yimin Zhang, PhD, and CAC Director Moeness Amin, PhD, as well as Braham Himed, PhD, technical advisor of the RF Technology Branch, Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). This research is sponsored by a three-year contract from the AFRL, for which Dr. Zhang serves as the Principal Investigator.
The IEEE International Radar Conference, organized by the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society, is the IEEE’s flagship conference on radar. Among more than 325 accepted papers from 35 countries, 87 papers qualified for the student best paper competition, and ten were selected as finalists and presented in the competition. A judging committee of renowned experts from both academia and industry selected three awardees based on factors including novelty, originality and contribution to the area, technical correctness and accuracy, and importance or significance of the results. As the second prize student winner, Subedi receives a certificate and a cash prize of $500.