Twenty-Five Years of Sensor Array and Multichannel Signal Processing: A review of progress to date and potential research directions

Abstract

In this article, a general introduction to the area of sensor array and multichannel signal processing is provided, including associated activities of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) Sensor Array and Multichannel (SAM) Technical Committee (TC). The main technological advances in five SAM subareas made in the past 25 years are then presented in detail, including beamforming, direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation, sensor location optimization, target/source localization based on sensor arrays, and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) arrays. Six recent developments are also provided at the end to indicate possible promising directions for future SAM research, which are graph signal processing (GSP) for sensor networks; tensor-based array signal processing, quaternion-valued array signal processing, 1-bit and noncoherent sensor array signal processing, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) for sensor arrays; and array signal processing for next-generation communication systems.