We study the problem of selecting a subset of vectors from a large set to obtain the best signal representation over a family of functions. Although greedy methods have been widely used to tackle this problem and many of those have been analyzed under the lens of (weak) submodularity, none of these algorithms are explicitly devised using such a functional property. Here, we revisit the vector-selection problem and introduce a function that is shown to be submodular in expectation. This function not only guarantees near-optimality through a greedy algorithm in expectation but also alleviates the existing deficiencies in commonly used matching pursuit (MP) algorithms. We further show the relation between the single-point-estimate version of the proposed greedy algorithm and MP variants. Moreover, we discuss extending the signal representation problem to instances with knapsack and matroid constraints. Our theoretical findings are supported by numerical experiments on the angle of arrival estimation problem, a typical signal representation task, demonstrating the benefits of our method compared to traditional MP algorithms.

Compressive sensing (CS) has been widely used in multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) radar in recent years. Unlike traditional MIMO radar, detection/estimation of targets in a CS-based MIMO radar is accomplished via sparse recovery. In this article, for a CS-based colocated MIMO radar with linear arrays, we attempt to improve the target detection performance by reducing the coherence of the associated sensing matrix. Our tool in reducing the coherence is the placement of the antennas across the array aperture. In particular, we choose antenna positions within a given grid. Initially, we formalize the position selection problem as finding binary weights for each of the locations. This problem is highly nonconvex and combinatorial in nature. Instead, we find continuous weight values for each location and interpret them as the probability of including an antenna at the given location. Next, we select antenna locations randomly according to the obtained probability distribution. We formulate the problem for the general case of a MIMO radar with independent transmit and receive arrays for which we propose an iterative algorithm. For the special case of a transceiver array, the solution is obtained through a convex optimization approach. Our experiments show that the proposed method achieves a superior detection performance compared to a uniform random placement of the antennas within the array aperture.

This article proposes a compressed-domain signal processing (CSP) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar, a MIMO radar approach that achieves substantial sample complexity reduction by exploiting the idea of CSP. CSP MIMO radar involves two levels of data compression followed by target detection at the compressed domain. First, compressive sensing is applied at the receive antennas, followed by a Capon beamformer, which is designed to suppress clutter. Exploiting the sparse nature of the beamformer output, a second compression is applied to the filtered data. Target detection is subsequently conducted by formulating and solving a hypothesis testing problem at each grid point of the discretized angle space. The proposed approach enables an eightfold reduction of the sample complexity in some settings as compared to a conventional compressed sensing (CS) MIMO radar, thus enabling faster target detection. Receiver operating characteristic curves of the proposed detector are provided. Simulation results show that the proposed approach outperforms recovery-based CS algorithms.