Dr. Moeness Amin Awarded Signal Processing Best Paper Award

The 2021 Best Paper Award in Signal Processing, an Elsevier journal, is given to "DOA estimation exploiting a uniform linear array with multiple co-prime frequencies." Co-authored by Villanova College of Engineering’s Dr. Moeness Amin, director of the Center for Advanced Communications; and his former PhD student, Dr. Si Qin; along with Dr. Yimin Zhang, Temple University; and Dr. Braham Himed, Air Force Research Lab; the article appeared in Volume 130, January 2017, Pages 37-46.

Focused on sparse antenna arrays with applications to radar, the paper designs the optimum array configuration for direction finding of targets, as well as radio frequency emitters. The team’s research introduces a new strategy to fully utilize the frequency and spatial degrees of freedom to provide high resolution estimates of the angular directions of a large number of sources in the field of view of the radio frequency receiver. The work was supported in part by the Office of Naval Research

Responding to news of the award, Dr. Amin says, “This shows both the depth and the scholarship of our research in radar.” A world-renowned radar signal processing expert, Dr. Amin has averaged one best paper journal award annually over the past seven years. 

Dr. Amin was also pleased to report that a paper co-authored by his former PhD student, Dr. Ali Hamza ’20 PhD; former postdoc Dr. Xiangrong Wang, and her PhD student Mr. Weitong Zhai whom Dr. Amin is co-advising was a finalist in the student paper competition at the 2021 IEEE Radar Conference. "Cognitive Optimization of Sparse Array Transceiver for MIMO Radar Beamforming" was one of five finalists out of 90 accepted student papers.

He says, “Although we did not win the best paper award this year, being in the top five out of 90 papers submitted from around the world in radar critical technologies is an achievement in itself.”