Near-Field Beam Training: Joint Angle and Range Estimation with DFT Codebook

Prior works on near-field beam training have mostly assumed dedicated polar-domain codebook and on-grid range estimation, which, however, may suffer long training overhead and degraded estimation accuracy. To address these issues, we propose in this paper new and efficient beam training schemes with off-grid range estimation by using conventional discrete Fourier transform (DFT) codebook. Specifically, we first analyze the received beam pattern at the user when far-field beamforming vectors are used for beam scanning, and show an interesting result that this beam pattern contains useful user angle and range information. Then, we propose two efficient schemes to jointly estimate the user angle and range with the DFT codebook. The first scheme estimates the user angle based on a defined angular support and resolves the user range by leveraging an approximated angular support width, while the second scheme estimates the user range by minimizing a power ratio mean square error (MSE) to improve the range estimation accuracy. Finally, numerical simulations show that our proposed schemes greatly reduce the near-field beam training overhead and improve the range estimation accuracy as compared to various benchmark schemes.

Learned Smartphone ISP on Mobile GPUs with Deep Learning, Mobile AI & AIM 2022 Challenge: Report

The role of mobile cameras increased dramatically over the past few years, leading to more and more research in automatic image quality enhancement and RAW photo processing. In this Mobile AI challenge, the target was to develop an efficient end-to-end AI-based image signal processing (ISP) pipeline replacing the standard mobile ISPs that can run on modern smartphone GPUs using TensorFlow Lite. The participants were provided with a large-scale Fujifilm UltraISP dataset consisting of thousands of paired photos captured with a normal mobile camera sensor and a professional 102MP medium-format FujiFilm GFX100 camera. The runtime of the resulting models was evaluated on the Snapdragon's 8 Gen 1 GPU that provides excellent acceleration results for the majority of common deep learning ops. The proposed solutions are compatible with all recent mobile GPUs, being able to process Full HD photos in less than 20-50 milliseconds while achieving high fidelity results. A detailed description of all models developed in this challenge is provided in this paper.

Fast Near-Field Beam Training for Extremely Large-Scale Array

In this letter, we study efficient near-field beam training design for the extremely large-scale array (XL-array) communication systems. Compared with the conventional far-field beam training method that searches for the best beam direction only, the near-field beam training is more challenging since it requires a beam search over both the angular and distance domains due to the spherical wavefront propagation model. To reduce the near-field beam-training overhead based on the two-dimensional exhaustive search, we propose in this letter a new two-phase beam training method that decomposes the two-dimensional search into two sequential phases. Specifically, in the first phase, the candidate angles of the user is determined by a new method based on the conventional far-field codebook and angle-domain beam sweeping. Then, a customized polar-domain codebook is employed in the second phase to find the best effective distance of the user given the shortlisted candidate angles. Numerical results show that our proposed two-phase beam training method significantly reduces the training overhead of the exhaustive search and yet achieves comparable beamforming performance for data transmission.

Investigating EEG-Based Functional Connectivity Patterns for Multimodal Emotion Recognition

Compared with the rich studies on the motor brain-computer interface (BCI), the recently emerging affective BCI presents distinct challenges since the brain functional connectivity networks involving emotion are not well investigated. Previous studies on emotion recognition based on electroencephalography (EEG) signals mainly rely on single-channel-based feature extraction methods. In this paper, we propose a novel emotion-relevant critical subnetwork selection algorithm and investigate three EEG functional connectivity network features: strength, clustering coefficient, and eigenvector centrality. The discrimination ability of the EEG connectivity features in emotion recognition is evaluated on three public emotion EEG datasets: SEED, SEED-V, and DEAP. The strength feature achieves the best classification performance and outperforms the state-of-the-art differential entropy feature based on single-channel analysis. The experimental results reveal that distinct functional connectivity patterns are exhibited for the five emotions of disgust, fear, sadness, happiness, and neutrality. Furthermore, we construct a multimodal emotion recognition model by combining the functional connectivity features from EEG and the features from eye movements or physiological signals using deep canonical correlation analysis. The classification accuracies of multimodal emotion recognition are 95.08/6.42% on the SEED dataset, 84.51/5.11% on the SEED-V dataset, and 85.34/2.90% and 86.61/3.76% for arousal and valence on the DEAP dataset, respectively. The results demonstrate the complementary representation properties of the EEG connectivity features with eye movement data. In addition, we find that the brain networks constructed with 18 channels achieve comparable performance with that of the 62-channel network in multimodal emotion recognition and enable easier setups for BCI systems in real scenarios.