Dr. Yimin D. Zhang, together with Dr. Shunqiao Sun from The University of Alabam, has delivered a four-hour tutorial on “Sparse Arrays and Sparse Waveforms: Design, Processing, and Applications” in 2025 European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), held in Palermo, Italy, on September 8.
Palermo is the capital of the beautiful island of Sicily — “the land of art, culture and beauty.”
Modern sensing and communication systems employ large-scale antenna arrays to achieve high spatial resolution and enhanced directional gain. However, this comes at the cost of increased hardware complexity. Sparse arrays offer an effective solution by maintaining a large aperture with significantly reduced system complexity. Recent advances in sparse array design and processing have led to improved direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation, radar imaging, and adaptive beamforming, thereby enhancing sensing accuracy and increasing communication capacity while keeping system complexity low.
This tutorial exploreed sparse arrays and sparse waveforms, covering fundamental concepts, optimum design, signal processing algorithms, machine learning methods, and real-world applications. It was organized into three technical sections: (1) sparse array design and processing, (2) sparse waveform design and processing, and (3) machine learning architectures and methods for sparsity-based processing.
The slides of the tutorial are available at the following links: Part I and Part II.
Dr. Zhang was also invited to deliver a keynote talk on September 12 at a satellite workshop of the conference, “Signal Processing for Autonomous System (SPAS),” on the topic of “Harnessing Frequency Diversity for Enhanced Direction-of-Arrival Estimation.”