Maria of The University of Pisa

Abstract: For several decades, the Gaussian assumption on the disturbance modeling in radar systems has been widely used to deal with detection problems. But, in modern high-resolution radar systems, the disturbance cannot be modelled as Gaussian distributed and the classical detectors suffer from high losses.
In this talk, after a brief description of modern statistical and spectral models for high-resolution clutter, coherent optimum and sub-optimum detectors, designed for such a background, will be presented and their performance analyzed against a non-Gaussian disturbance. Different interpretations of the various detectors are provided that highlight the relationships and the differences among them.
After this first part, some discussion will be dedicated to how to make adaptive the detectors, by incorporating a proper estimate of the disturbance covariance matrix. Recent works on Maximum Likelihood and robust covariance matrix estimation have proposed different approaches such as the Approximate ML (or Fixed-Point) Estimator or the M-estimators. These techniques allow to improve the detection performance in terms of false alarm regulation and detection gain in SNR.
Some of results with simulated and real recorded data will be shown.

Biography:

Maria Sabrina Greco(Fellow IEEE) is with the Dept. of Information Engineering of the University of Pisa, where she is Full Professor since 2017. She’s IEEE fellow since Jan. 2011. She was co-recipient of the 2001, 2012 and 2021 IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society’s Barry Carlton Awards for Best Paper published on the T-AES, co-recipient of 2019 EURASIP JASP Best Paper Award, co-recipient of the 2019 H Mimno Award for the best paper published on the AE Systems Magazine, recipient of the 2008 Fred Nathanson Young Engineer of the Year award for contributions to signal processing, estimation, and detection theory and of IEEE AESS Board of Governors Exceptional Service Award for “Exemplary Service and Dedication and Professionalism, as EiC of the IEEE AES Magazine”. 

She has been general-chair, technical program chair and organizing committee member of many international conferences over the last 20 years. She has been also lead-guest editor of many special issues on Radar Signal Processing. She has been President of IEEE AESS (2024-25), member of the IEEE SPS BoG (2015-17), Chair of the IEEE AESS Radar Panel (2015-16), Chair of the IEEE Sensor Arrays and Multichannel Signal Processing Technical Committee (2023-24), Founder Chair of the AESS Integrated Sensing and Communication Technical Working Group, IEEE SPS Distinguished Lecturer for the years 2014-2015, AESS VP Publications (2018-2020), EiC of the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine, EiC of the EURASIP Journal of Advances in Signal Processing (2021-25) and IEEE SPS Director-at-Large for Region 8 (2021-22). She’s now member of the EURASIP Board of Governors, AESS Distinguished Lecturer and AESS Past President.

Her general interests are in the areas of statistical signal processing, estimation and detection theory. In particular, her research interests include clutter models, coherent and incoherent detection in non-Gaussian clutter, CFAR techniques, radar waveform diversity, bistatic/mustistatic active and passive radars, cognitive radars and integration of sensing and communications. She co-authored many book chapters and about 350 journal and conference papers.

Address:Italy