A paper that Dr. Yimin D. Zhang coauthored with his former post-doctoral research fellow, Dr. Yujie Gu, and other collaborators and published in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing in November 2018 received the 2021 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award.
The paper, titled “Direction-of-arrival estimation for coprime array via virtual array interpolation,” introduced the theory of gridless atomic norm representation for the first time to the field of array signal processing. The resulting algorithm enables the continuous definition of directional parameters in the second-order virtual array statistics so that underdetermined direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation can be performed in a gridless manner to pursue super-resolution. This paper developed a novel virtual array interpolation framework to create a Nyquist-matched virtual array without discarding the virtual sensors. This framework enabled missing lag interpolation and thus significantly advanced the state-of-the-art of sparse array designs in the sense that discountinuous lags in the virtual array no longer decrease but rather increase the achievable degrees-of-freedom. The significant findings made in this paper fundamentally shifted the paradigm of sparse array design and processing, and provided remarkable performance improvement in underdetermined DOA estimation.
This paper has been cited more than 270 times since its publication three years ago.
According to IEEE Signal Processing Society, the Young Author Best Paper Award honors the author(s) of an especially meritorious paper dealing with a subject related to the Society’s technical scope and appearing in one of the Society’s solely owned transactions (including the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing) or the Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing and who, upon the date of submission of the paper, is less than 30 years of age. Up to six Young Author Best Paper Awards may be presented each year.