Hybrid 3D Beamforming Relying on Sensor-Based Training and Channel Estimation for Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Aided TeraHertz MIMO systems

Terahertz (THz) systems have the benefit of high bandwidth and hence are capable of supporting ultra-high data rates, albeit at the cost of high pathloss. Hence they tend to harness high-gain beamforming. Therefore a novel hybrid 3D beamformer relying on sophisticated sensor-based beam training and channel estimation is proposed for Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) aided THz MIMO systems. A so-called array-of-subarray based THz BS architecture is adopted and the corresponding sub-RIS structure is proposed. The BS, RIS and receiver antenna arrays of the users are all uniform planar arrays (UPAs). The Ultra-wideband (UWB) sensors are integrated into the RIS and the user location information obtained by the UWB sensors is exploited for channel estimation and beamforming. Furthermore, the novel concept of a Precise Beamforming Algorithm (PBA) is proposed, which further improves the beam-forming accuracy by circumventing the performance limitations imposed by positioning errors. Moreover, the conditions of maintaining the orthogonality of the RIS-aided THz channel are derived in support of spatial multiplexing. The closed-form expressions of the near-field and far-field path-loss are also derived. Our simulation results show that the proposed scheme accurately estimates the RIS-aided THz channel and the spectral efficiency is much improved, despite its low complexity. This makes our solution eminently suitable for delay-sensitive applications.

A Novel Deep Learning Method for Thermal to Annotated Thermal-Optical Fused Images

Thermal Images profile the passive radiation of objects and capture them in grayscale images. Such images have a very different distribution of data compared to optical colored images. We present here a work that produces a grayscale thermo-optical fused mask given a thermal input. This is a deep learning based pioneering work since to the best of our knowledge, there exists no other work on thermal-optical grayscale fusion. Our method is also unique in the sense that the deep learning method we are proposing here works on the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) domain instead of the gray level domain. As a part of this work, we also present a new and unique database for obtaining the region of interest in thermal images based on an existing thermal visual paired database, containing the Region of Interest on 5 different classes of data. Finally, we are proposing a simple low cost overhead statistical measure for identifying the region of interest in the fused images, which we call as the Region of Fusion (RoF). Experiments on the database show encouraging results in identifying the region of interest in the fused images. We also show that they can be processed better in the mixed form rather than with only thermal images.