Modern radio frequency (RF) sensors are digital systems characterized by wide band frequency range, and capable to perform multi-function tasks such as: radar, electronic warfare (EW), and communications simultaneously on different sub-arrays. This demands careful understanding of the behavior of each sub-system and how each sub-array interacts with the others. A way to estimate and measure the active reflection coefficient (ARC) to calculate the active voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR) of multiple input multiple output (MIMO) radar when elements (or sub-arrays) are driven with different waveforms has been developed. This technique will help to understand and incorporate bounds in the design of MIMO systems and its waveforms to avoid damages by large power reflections and to improve system performance. The methodology developed consists of evaluating the active VSWR at each individual antenna element or sub-array from (1) estimates of the ARC by using computational electromagnetic (CEM) tools or (2) by directly measuring the ARC at each antenna element or sub-array. The former methodology is important especially at the design phase where trade offs between element shapes and geometrical configurations are taking place. The former methodology is expanded by directly measuring ARC using an experimental radar testbed Baseband-digital at Every Element MIMO Experimental Radar (BEEMER) system to assess the active VSWR, side-lobe levels and antenna pattern effects when different waveforms are transmitted. An optimization technique is implemented to mitigate the effects of the ARC in co-located MIMO radars by waveform design.

Constant false alarm rate is one of the essential algorithms in a RADAR detection system. It allows the RADAR system to dynamically set thresholds based on the data power level to distinguish targets with interfering noise and clutters.

To have a better acknowledgment of constant false alarm rate approaches performance, three clutter models, Gamma, Weibull, and Log-normal, have been introduced to evaluate the detection's capability of each constant false alarm rate algorithm.

The order statistical constant false alarm rate approach outperforms other conventional constant false alarm rate methods, especially in clutter evolved environments. However, this method requires high power consumption due to repeat sorting.
In the automotive RADAR system, the computational complexity of algorithms is essential because this system is in real-time. Therefore, the algorithms must be fast and efficient to ensure low power consumption and processing time.

The reduced computational complexity implementations of cell-averaging and order statistic constant false alarm rate were explored. Their big O and processing time has been reduced.

Unmanned aerial systems (UASs) have recently enabled novel applications such as passenger transport and package delivery, but are increasingly vulnerable to cyberattack and therefore difficult to certify. Legacy systems such as GPS provide these capabilities extremely well, but are sensitive to spoofing and hijacking. An alternative intelligent transport system (ITS) was developed that provides highly secure communications, positioning, and timing synchronization services to networks of cooperative RF users, termed Communications and High-Precision Positioning (CHP2) system. This technology was implemented on consumer-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and it offers rapid (<100 ms) and precise (<5 cm) positioning capabilities in over-the-air experiments using flexible ground stations and UAS platforms using limited bandwidth (10 MHz). In this study, CHP2 is considered in the context of safety-critical and resource limited transport applications and urban air mobility. The two-way ranging (TWR) protocol over a joint positioning-communications waveform enables distributed coherence and time-of-flight(ToF) estimation. In a multi-antenna setup, the cross-platform ranging on participating nodes in the network translate to precise target location and orientation. In the current form, CHP2 necessitates a cooperative timing exchange at regular intervals. Dynamic resource management supports higher user densities by constantly renegotiating spectral access depending on need and opportunity. With these novel contributions to the field of integrated positioning and communications, CHP2 is a suitable candidate to provide both communications, navigation, and surveillance (CNS) and alternative positioning, navigation, and timing (APNT) services for high density safety-critical transport applications on a variety of vehicular platforms.

The problem of multiple object tracking seeks to jointly estimate the time-varying cardinality and trajectory of each object. There are numerous challenges that are encountered in tracking multiple objects including a time-varying number of measurements, under varying constraints, and environmental conditions. In this thesis, the proposed statistical methods integrate the use of physical-based models with Bayesian nonparametric methods to address the main challenges in a tracking problem. In particular, Bayesian nonparametric methods are exploited to efficiently and robustly infer object identity and learn time-dependent cardinality; together with Bayesian inference methods, they are also used to associate measurements to objects and estimate the trajectory of objects. These methods differ from the current methods to the core as the existing methods are mainly based on random finite set theory.

The first contribution proposes dependent nonparametric models such as the dependent Dirichlet process and the dependent Pitman-Yor process to capture the inherent time-dependency in the problem at hand. These processes are used as priors for object state distributions to learn dependent information between previous and current time steps. Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling methods exploit the learned information to sample from posterior distributions and update the estimated object parameters.

The second contribution proposes a novel, robust, and fast nonparametric approach based on a diffusion process over infinite random trees to infer information on object cardinality and trajectory. This method follows the hierarchy induced by objects entering and leaving a scene and the time-dependency between unknown object parameters. Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling methods integrate the prior distributions over the infinite random trees with time-dependent diffusion processes to update object states.

The third contribution develops the use of hierarchical models to form a prior for statistically dependent measurements in a single object tracking setup. Dependency among the sensor measurements provides extra information which is incorporated to achieve the optimal tracking performance. The hierarchical Dirichlet process as a prior provides the required flexibility to do inference. Bayesian tracker is integrated with the hierarchical Dirichlet process prior to accurately estimate the object trajectory.

The fourth contribution proposes an approach to model both the multiple dependent objects and multiple dependent measurements. This approach integrates the dependent Dirichlet process modeling over the dependent object with the hierarchical Dirichlet process modeling of the measurements to fully capture the dependency among both object and measurements. Bayesian nonparametric models can successfully associate each measurement to the corresponding object and exploit dependency among them to more accurately infer the trajectory of objects. Markov chain Monte Carlo methods amalgamate the dependent Dirichlet process with the hierarchical Dirichlet process to infer the object identity and object cardinality.

Simulations are exploited to demonstrate the improvement in multiple object tracking performance when compared to approaches that are developed based on random finite set theory.

Digital imaging and image processing technologies have revolutionized the way in which

we capture, store, receive, view, utilize, and share images. In image-based applications,

through different processing stages (e.g., acquisition, compression, and transmission), images

are subjected to different types of distortions which degrade their visual quality. Image

Quality Assessment (IQA) attempts to use computational models to automatically evaluate

and estimate the image quality in accordance with subjective evaluations. Moreover, with

the fast development of computer vision techniques, it is important in practice to extract

and understand the information contained in blurred images or regions.

The work in this dissertation focuses on reduced-reference visual quality assessment of

images and textures, as well as perceptual-based spatially-varying blur detection.

A training-free low-cost Reduced-Reference IQA (RRIQA) method is proposed. The

proposed method requires a very small number of reduced-reference (RR) features. Extensive

experiments performed on different benchmark databases demonstrate that the proposed

RRIQA method, delivers highly competitive performance as compared with the

state-of-the-art RRIQA models for both natural and texture images.

In the context of texture, the effect of texture granularity on the quality of synthesized

textures is studied. Moreover, two RR objective visual quality assessment methods that

quantify the perceived quality of synthesized textures are proposed. Performance evaluations

on two synthesized texture databases demonstrate that the proposed RR metrics outperforms

full-reference (FR), no-reference (NR), and RR state-of-the-art quality metrics in

predicting the perceived visual quality of the synthesized textures.

Last but not least, an effective approach to address the spatially-varying blur detection

problem from a single image without requiring any knowledge about the blur type, level,

or camera settings is proposed. The evaluations of the proposed approach on a diverse

sets of blurry images with different blur types, levels, and content demonstrate that the

proposed algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods qualitatively

and quantitatively.

This thesis work present the simulation of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi radios in real life interference environments. When information is transmitted via communication channels, data may get corrupted due to noise and other channel discrepancies. In order to receive the information safely and correctly, error correction coding schemes are generally employed during the design of communication systems. Usually the simulations of wireless communication systems are done in such a way that they focus on some aspect of communications and neglect the others. The simulators available currently will either do network layer simulations or physical layer level simulations. In many situations, simulations are required which show inter-layer aspects of communication systems. For all such scenarios, a simulation environment, WiscaComm which is based on time-domain samples is built. WiscaComm allows the study of network and physical layer interactions in detail. The advantage of time domain sampling is that it allows the simulation of different radios together which is better than the complex baseband representation of symbols. The environment also supports study of multiple protocols operating simultaneously, which is of increasing importance in today's environment.

RF convergence of radar and communications users is rapidly becoming an issue for a multitude of stakeholders. To hedge against growing spectral congestion, research into cooperative radar and communications systems has been identified as a critical necessity for the United States and other countries. Further, the joint sensing-communicating paradigm appears imminent in several technological domains. In the pursuit of co-designing radar and communications systems that work cooperatively and benefit from each other's existence, joint radar-communications metrics are defined and bounded as a measure of performance. Estimation rate is introduced, a novel measure of radar estimation information as a function of time. Complementary to communications data rate, the two systems can now be compared on the same scale. An information-centric approach has a number of advantages, defining precisely what is gained through radar illumination and serves as a measure of spectral efficiency. Bounding radar estimation rate and communications data rate jointly, systems can be designed as a joint optimization problem.

Parkinson's disease is a neurodegenerative condition diagnosed on patients with

clinical history and motor signs of tremor, rigidity and bradykinesia, and the estimated

number of patients living with Parkinson's disease around the world is seven

to ten million. Deep brain stimulation (DBS) provides substantial relief of the motor

signs of Parkinson's disease patients. It is an advanced surgical technique that is used

when drug therapy is no longer sufficient for Parkinson's disease patients. DBS alleviates the motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease by targeting the subthalamic nucleus using high-frequency electrical stimulation.

This work proposes a behavior recognition model for patients with Parkinson's

disease. In particular, an adaptive learning method is proposed to classify behavioral

tasks of Parkinson's disease patients using local field potential and electrocorticography

signals that are collected during DBS implantation surgeries. Unique patterns

exhibited between these signals in a matched feature space would lead to distinction

between motor and language behavioral tasks. Unique features are first extracted

from deep brain signals in the time-frequency space using the matching pursuit decomposition

algorithm. The Dirichlet process Gaussian mixture model uses the extracted

features to cluster the different behavioral signal patterns, without training or

any prior information. The performance of the method is then compared with other

machine learning methods and the advantages of each method is discussed under

different conditions.