The European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP) has selected a research paper that was co-authored by Dr. Si Qin, former Ph.D. student of the Advanced Signal Processing (ASP) Lab, and Dr. Yimin Daniel Zhang, Director of the ASP Lab, to receive the 2021 EURASIP Best Paper Award for Signal Processing journal.
The award-winning paper, “DOA estimation exploiting a uniform linear array with multiple co-prime frequencies,” was published in the Signal Processing journal in January 2017. This paper developed a novel framework to design sparse sensor arrays by extending the well-known coprime array and filtering concept to the joint spatio-spectral domain, thereby achieving high flexibility in array structure design and providing much higher degrees of freedom. This paper was coauthored by Dr. Moeness G. Amin of Villanova University and Dr. Braham Himed of the Air Force Research Laboratory.
The EURASIP was founded in 1978 to “improve communication between groups and individuals that work within the multidisciplinary, fast growing field of Signal Processing in Europe and elsewhere, and to exchange and disseminate information in the field all over the world,” and Signal Processing is the flagship journal of the EURASIP and one of the most prestigious publications in the signal processing community. Dr. Zhang has been serving on the Editorial Board of Signal Processing since 2008.
This is the third best journal paper award Dr. Zhang received on the emerging topic of sparse array design and processing, which form one of the core focusing areas of ASP Lab’s recent research activities. Paper “Generalized coprime array configurations for direction-of-arrival estimation,” coauthored by Dr. Qin, Dr. Zhang, and Dr. Amin and published in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing in March 2015, received the 2018 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award. Another paper, “Compressive sensing based coprime array direction-of-arrival estimation” coauthored by Dr. Yujie Gu, then post-doctoral research fellow at the ASP Lab, Dr. Zhang, and collaborators from Zhejiang University, China, published in the IET Communications in August 2017, received the 2019 IET Communications Premium Award.
In addition, two conference papers received student best paper awards. Conference paper “DOA estimation exploiting interpolated multi-frequency sparse array,” coauthored by Dr. Shuimei Zhang and Dr. Ammar Ahmed, then Ph.D. students of the ASP Lab, Dr. Zhang, and Dr. Shunqiao Sun of University of Alabama, received the Best Student Paper Award from the IEEE Sensor Array and Multichannel Signal Processing Workshop, held virtually in Hangzhou, China, June 2020. Another conference paper, “Effective nested array design for fourth-order cumulant-based DOA estimation,” coauthored by Dr. Ammar Ahmed, then first-year Ph.D. student of the ASP Lab, Dr. Zhang, and Dr. Braham Himed of Air Force Research Laboratory, received the third prize Best Student Paper Award from the 2017 IEEE International Radar Conference.
The EURASIP Best Paper Award will be presented during 2021 EURASIP Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), to be held in Dublin, Ireland, in August 2021 and delivered virtually due to the pandemics.