In this paper, we propose a generalized co-prime multiple input multiple output (MIMO) configuration for direction of arrival (DOA) estimation. Compared with the conventional co-prime MIMO radar that requires prototype co-prime arrays (CPAs) for transmitter and receiver, the proposed configuration enlarges the inter-element spacing of transmitter with an integer expansion factor. By vectorizing the sample covariance matrix, the generalized sum and difference coarray (GSDC) concept is defined for exploiting the advantages of proposed configuration. The analytical expressions for the expansion factor, the maximum consecutive lags and the number of unique lags are derived carefully. It is verified that GSDC can obtain more degrees of freedom (DOFs) with the increase of expansion factor. Specifically, with O(M+N) sensors, GSDC can provide O(M2N2) DOFs, whereas the conventional one only has O(MN) DOFs. Simulation results demonstrate the usefulness of proposed configuration utilizing both spatial smoothing and sparse representation algorithms.

The pine wilt disease (PWD) is one of the most dangerous and destructive diseases to coniferous forests. The rapid spread trend and strong destruction directly threaten the security of forests. The complex spread pattern and the hard labor process of diagnosis call for an effective way to detect the infected areas. In this paper, an airborne edge-computing and lightweight deep learning based system are designed for PWD detection by using imagery sensors. Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is firstly utilized to realize a large-scale coverage of forests, which can substantially reduce the hard labor. Except for infected trees, a large number of irrelevant images are also acquired by the UAV, which will overload the burden of process and transmission. Then a lightweight improved YOLOv4-Tiny based method (named as YOLOv4-Tiny-3Layers) is proposed to filter these uninterested images by leveraging the computation capability of edge computing, which can realize a fast coarse-grained detection with a low missing rate. Finally, all the remaining images are transmitted to the ground workstation for the final fine-grained detection. Experimental results show that the proposed system can implement a fast detection with superior performance as compared to other methods, which helps to detect the infected pine trees in a quick manner.

This paper considers the direction of arrival (DOA) estimation of coherent and uncorrelated targets by exploiting a flexible multiple input multiple output (MIMO) radar. First, the proposed radar is generalized with two coprime expansion factors for enlarging the inter-element spacing of transmit and receive arrays, referred to as sparse arrays with flexible inter-element spacing (SA-FIS), which shows that the conventional nested or coprime ones are the special cases. The range of consecutive lags and the number of unique lags in the sum-difference coarray are derived in closed-form. It is verified that SA-FIS can obtain the maximum unique lags and also suppress the mutual coupling effects. We then extend the FIS viewpoint to sparse nonuniform linear arrays, where the two-level nested and coprime arrays are employed to achieve a significant increase in degrees of freedom (DOFs). Furthermore, to fully utilize these unique lags, we propose a reduced-complexity two-step sparse representation (SR) algorithm. By modifying and removing the off-diagonal elements of the estimated target covariance matrix, the proposed method can just identify the diagonal ones, thereby leading to further improved performance with much lower computational complexity. Finally, the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) on DOAs and correlated coefficients for SA-FIS is derived. Numerical simulations demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method with SA-FIS in terms of DOFs, computations, estimation accuracy and resolution capability compared with previous ones.

The problem of direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation is investigated for co-prime array, where the co-prime array consists of two uniform sparse linear subarrays with extended inter-element spacing. For each sparse subarray, true DOAs are mapped into several equivalent angles impinging on the traditional uniform linear array with half-wavelength spacing. Then, by applying the estimation of signal parameters via rotational invariance technique (ESPRIT), the equivalent DOAs are estimated, and the candidate DOAs are recovered according to the relationship among equivalent and true DOAs. Finally, the true DOAs are estimated by combining the results of the two subarrays. The proposed method achieves a better complexity–performance tradeoff as compared to other existing methods.

Pine wilt disease (PWD) has become increasingly serious recently and causes great damage to the world’s pine forest resources. The use of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based remote sensing helps to identify pine nematode trees in time and has become a feasible and effective approach to precisely monitor PWD infection. However, a rapid and high-accuracy detection approach has not been well established in a complex terrain environment. To this end, a deep learning-based pine nematode tree identification method is proposed by fusing visible and multispectral imagery. A UAV equipped with a multispectral camera and a visible camera was used to obtain imagery, where multispectral imagery includes six bands, i.e., red, green, blue, near-infrared, red edge and red edge 750 nm. Two vegetation indexes, NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) and NDRE (Normalized Difference Red Edge Index) are extracted as a typical feature according to the reflectance of infected trees in different spectral bands. The YOLOv5 (You Only Look Once v5)-based detection algorithm is adopted and optimized from different aspects to realize the identification of infected pine trees with high detection speed and accuracy. e.g., GhostNet is adopted to reduce the number of model parameters and improve the detection speed; a module combining a CBAM (Convolutional Block Attention Module) and a CA (Coordinate Attention) mechanism is designed to improve the feature extraction for small-scale pine nematode trees; Transformer module and BiFPN (Bidirectional Feature Pyramid Network) structure are applied to improve the feature fusion capability. The experiments show that the mAP@0.5 of the improved YOLOv5 model is 98.7%, the precision is 98.1%, the recall is 97.3%, the average detection speed of single imagery is 0.067 s, and the model size is 46.69 MB. All these metrics outperform other comparison methods. Therefore, the proposed method can achieve a fast and accurate detection of pine nematode trees, providing effective technical support for the control of a pine nematode epidemic.

A technique to emulate 3D geometry‐based channel models in a multi‐probe over the air test setup is presented. The proposed technique provides a general emulation framework for any spherical incoming power spectrum. The emulation method results in two optimisation objectives, which are both convex. They give optimal emulation accuracy and allow relatively low computational complexity.