2025 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing

ABSTRACT

The Summer School is being planned with the Pre-conference satellite workshop to ICASSP 2025 titled “Crossroads of Machine Learning and Signal Processing” that will be held in New Delhi between April 2nd and 3rd 2025.

There are plenty of signals of interest — complex, hidden, weak, and distant — that are difficult to measure or acquire. For instance, an airborne radar’s swath is limited while using a conventional phased array antenna. Similarly, it is tedious to image a three-dimensional (3-D) object using a single sensor. In optics, in the absence of advanced phase retrieval techniques, the complex signal cannot be accurately
estimated from magnitude-only diffraction patterns. Once the signal is acquired, retrieving useful information from it entails developing an additional set of algorithms to sample, process, and enhance it. It is against this background that synthetic aperture (SA) systems, which provide improved signal acquisition and information extraction than is inherently possible via a single sensor, have gained salience in
various signal processing applications. The concept of SA has been leveraged in a variety of applications to improve environmental imaging and sensing performance beyond the spatial or temporal resolution limits of conventional antennas and sensors. In general, SAs are generated by moving an antenna, sensor, or probe to different spatial locations such that it records phase coherent measurement samples
over an extended volume. The most prominent example of SA application is, of course, in radar remote sensing. In the case of synthetic aperture radar (SAR), the antenna is mounted on an airplane and constant velocity motion along the flight path creates an angle-
dependent Doppler shift that is used to image a ground scene with cross-range resolution proportional to the length of the aircraft’s path along the coherent processing interval. In channel sounding applications where the propagation characteristics of a static wireless environment must be determined, the SA is created by using a robot or other mechanical positioner to move the antenna and
collect phase-coherent samples from different spatial locations. The complex samples are then combined coherently in post-processing to yield high-resolution angle estimates of signal sources and scatterers.

The rising importance of SAs in signal processing was recently recognized by the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) when it formally approved the creation of the Synthetic Aperture Technical Working Group (SA-TWG) in April 2020 under the auspices of the Sensor Array and Multichannel (SAM) Technical Committee (TC): https://signalprocessingsociety.org/community-involvement/synthetic-aperture-
technical-working-group/synthetic-aperture-technical

This subsequently led to the establishment of the first standards committee of SPS in the form of the IEEE Synthetic Aperture Standards Committee (SASC) in 2021: https://sagroups.ieee.org/sps-sasc/

The SA-TWG itself has spanned into a large community drawing researchers from at least six different TCs: Applied Signal Processing Systems TC, Bio Imaging and Signal Processing TC, Computational Imaging TC, Sensor Array and Multichannel TC, Signal Processing for Communications and Networking TC, Signal Processing Theory and Methods TC. A crucial aspect of these efforts is to train a future workforce and researchers who are well-equipped with the contemporary knowledge of SA technologies and challenges. In this context, this summer school, the first of its kind, aims to bring together leaders from across the globe to disseminate learning on various SA topics – SAR, ISAR, sonar, ISAC, and optics – to students. The seasonal school is organized by various members of the SA-TWG.

Venue: Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology New Delhi, Okhla Phase III, New Delhi 110020, India

Email of the Primary Technical Contact: shobha@iiitd.ac.in

Organization Committee:

1. General Chairs: Kumar Vijay Mishra, United States DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory, USA, and Shobha Sundar Ram, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi, India
2. Technical Chairs: Raghu Raj, US Naval Research Laboratory, USA, and Muralidhar Rangaswamy, US Air Force Research Laboratory

Target Audience: Graduate students (M.Tech, PhD Students), young professionals, early career academics.

 Registration: To be announced (TBA)