Sparse Sensing With Co-Prime Samplers and Arrays

This paper considers the sampling of temporal or spatial wide sense stationary (WSS) signals using a co-prime pair of sparse samplers. Several properties and applications of co-prime samplers are developed. First, for uniform spatial sampling with M and N sensors where M and N are co-prime with appropriate interelement spacings, the difference co-array has O(MN) freedoms which can be exploited in beamforming and in direction of arrival estimation. An M -point DFT filter bank and an N-point DFT filter bank can be used at the outputs of the two sensor arrays and their outputs combined in such a way that there are effectively MN bands (i.e., MN narrow beams with beamwidths proportional to 1/MN), a result…