Manuel S. Stein

Delft University of Technology | TU · Department of Microelectronics - Circuits and Systems Group (CAS)

This paper investigates the problem of estimating the spectral power parameters of random analog sources using numerical measurements acquired with minimum digitization complexity. Therefore, spectral analysis has to be performed with binary samples of the analog sensor output. Under the assumption that the structure of the spectral power density o...

We consider the problem of making a quick decision in favor of one of two possible physical signal models while the numerical measurements are acquired by sensing devices featuring minimal digitization complexity. Therefore, the digital data streams available for statistical processing are binary and exhibit temporal and spatial dependencies. To ha...

Energy consumption and hardware cost of signal digitization together with the management of the resulting data volume form serious issues for high-rate measurement systems with multiple sensors. Switching to binary sensing front-ends results in resource-efficient systems but is commonly associated with significant distortion due to the nonlinear si...

We consider the problem of making a quick decision in favor of one of two possible physical models while the numerical measurements are acquired by sensing devices featuring minimal digitization complexity. Therefore, the digital data streams available for statistical processing are binary and exhibit temporal and spatial dependencies. To handle th...

We discuss the problem of deriving compact and tractable lower bounds for the Fisher information matrix. To motivate our particular approach towards such expressions, we first examine the structure of the exact Fisher information matrix in the context of exponential family models. Then, by replacing an arbitrary data model by an equivalent distribu...

This paper considers the problem of determining and comparing the quality of nonlinear sensor systems concerning a measurement task in a data-driven way. Due to various noise sources and nonlinear characteristics, physical sensor and measurement systems, in general, exhibit an intractable random input-to-output behavior. In practice, this makes it...

In this work, the problem of signal parameter estimation from measurements acquired by a low-complexity analog-to-digital converter (ADC) with 1-bit output resolution and an unknown quantization threshold is considered. Single comparator ADCs are energy-efficient and can be operated at ultra-high sampling rates. For analysis of such systems, a fixe...

Detecting the presence of an active random wireless source with minimum latency utilizing array signal processing is considered. The problem is studied under the constraint that the analog-to-digital conversion at each radio sensor is restricted to the reading of the analog receive signal sign. We formulate the digital signal processing task as a s...

This work considers detecting the presence of a band-limited random radio source using an antenna array featuring a low-complexity digitization process with single-bit output resolution. In contrast to high-resolution analog-to-digital conversion, such a direct transformation of the analog radio measurements to a binary representation can be implem...

In this work, the optimization of the analog transmit waveform for joint delay-Doppler estimation under sub-Nyquist conditions is considered. In particular, we derive an estimation theoretic design rule for the Fourier coefficients of the analog transmit signal when violating the sampling theorem at the receiver by using a wide analog pre-filtering...

In this article a framework is presented for the joint optimization of the analog transmit and receive filter with respect to a channel estimation problem. At the receiver, conventional signal processing systems restrict the bandwidth of the analog pre-filter $B$ to the rate of the analog-to-digital converter $f_s$ in order to comply with the well-...

In this paper, the problem of signal parameter estimation from measurements acquired by a low-complexity analog-to-digital converter (ADC) with $1$-bit output resolution and an unknown quantization threshold is considered. Single-comparator ADCs are energy-efficient and can be operated at ultra-high sampling rates. For analysis of such hard-limitin...

Analog-to-digtial (A/D) conversion plays a crucial role when it comes to the design of energy-efficient and fast signal processing systems. As its complexity grows exponentially with the number of output bits, significant savings are possible when resorting to a minimum resolution of a single bit. However, then the nonlinear effect which is introdu...

The problem of determining the intrinsic quality of a signal processing system with respect to the inference of an unknown deterministic parameter θ is considered. While the Fisher information measure F(θ) forms a classical tool for such a problem, direct computation of the information measure can become difficult in various situations. For the est...

We discuss the problem how to determine the quality of a nonlinear system with respect to a measurement task. Due to amplification, filtering, quantization and internal noise sources physical measurement equipment in general exhibits a nonlinear and random input-to-output behaviour. This usually makes it impossible to accurately describe the underl...

Energy-efficient signal processing systems require estimation methods operating on data collected with low-complexity devices. Using analog-to-digital converters (ADC) with 1-bit amplitude resolution has been identified as a possible option in order to obtain low power consumption. The 1-bit performance loss, in comparison to an ideal receiver with...

Parameter estimation using quantized observations is of importance in many practical applications. Under a symmetric 1-bit setup, consisting of a zero-threshold hard-limiter, it is well known that the large sample performance loss for low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) is moderate (2/Π or -1.96dB). This makes low-complexity analog-to-digital convert...

While 1-bit analog-to-digital conversion (ADC) allows to significantly reduce the analog complexity of wireless receive systems, using the exact likelihood function of the hard-limiting system model in order to obtain efficient algorithms in the digital domain can make 1-bit signal processing challenging. If the signal model before the quantizer co...

The problem how to derive a generic lower bound for the Fisher information measure is considered. We review a recent approach by two examples and identify a connection between the construction of strong Fisher information bounds and the sufficient statistics of the underlying system model. In order to present the problem of such information bounds...

In order to perform precise radio-based ranging, the carrier phase information of the ranging signal needs to be exploited. State-of-the-art is to measure the phase as an independent parameter. Since the mapping from the carrier- phase to the time-delay parameter is ambiguous, measurements of multiple transmitters over multiple time instances can b...

The problem of signal parameter estimation and tracking with measurement data of low amplitude resolution is considered. In particular the performance-loss of a simplistic receiver with 1-bit resolution in comparison to an ideal receiver with infinite resolution is investigated. For the case where the measurement data is available after a hard-limi...

The design of the analog demodulator for receivers with low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADC) is investigated. For infinite ADC resolution, demodulation to baseband with M = 2 orthogonal sinusoidal functions (quadrature demodulation) is an optimum design choice. For receive systems which are restricted to ADC with low amplitude resoluti...

The problem of parameter estimation from large noisy data is considered. If the observation size $N$ is large, the calculation of efficient estimators is computationally expensive. Further, memory can be a limiting factor in technical systems where data is stored for later processing. Here we follow the idea of reducing the size of the observation...

The problem of optimum analog receive filtering for digital signal detection and parameter estimation is considered. Here the case of a signal source with bandwidth Bt and a receiver with fixed sampling rate fs is discussed under the assumption that 2Bt > fs. We investigate the impact of adjusting the receive bandwidth Br of the analog pre-filter,...

In the context of satellite-based positioning, the problem of range-estimation with low resolution analog-to-digital conversion (ADC) is considered. While ADC with coarse output resolution degrades the positioning performance of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers, it's simplicity allows to realize sampling at high spatial and tempo...

The problem how to approximately determine the absolute value of the Fisher information measure for a general parametric probabilistic system is considered. Having available the first and second moment of the system output in a parametric form, it is shown that the information measure can be bounded from below through a replacement of the original...

This work investigates the problem of direction-of-arrival estimation with a large number of antennas. As in practice the number of antennas M is limited by power and hardware constraints, here the possibility to compress the receive signal, prior to the estimation task, to K < 2M real-valued outputs is discussed. Under a Bayesian perspective, we s...

Using coarse resolution analog-to-digital conversion (ADC) offers the possibility to reduce the complexity of digital receive systems but introduces a loss in effective signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) when comparing to ideal receivers with infinite resolution ADC. Therefore, here the problem of signal parameter estimation from a coarsely quantized rece...

Accurate time-delay measurement is essential for positioning with Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). For mobile receivers small cost, moderate complexity and low energy consumption are desirable. In contrast, Safety-of-Life (SoL) applications require fast processing in order to meet strict time constraints. Concerning these technical consi...

Accurate synchronization and positioning in space and time is a key enabler for a wide variety of technical applications ranging from remote farming, automatic docking and landing to network synchronization and location-based services. Today, radio-based positioning systems like Global Satellite Navigation Systems (GNSS) offer the possibility to pe...

Reliable estimation of position in time and space has become a key necessity in several technical applications like mobile navigation, precision farming or network synchronization. While the increasing amount of operating Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) offers diverse possibilities to receive GNSS signals worldwide and to determine posit...

A restricted two-way communication problem in a small network is investigated. The network consists of three nodes, all having access to a common channel with half-duplex constraint. Two nodes want to establish a dialog while the third node can assist in the bi-directional transmission process. All nodes have agreed on a transmission protocol a pri...