Computational Sensing

Utilizing computation to improve sensing capabilities.

Our research in the area of computational sensing focuses on signal acquisition and design, signal modeling and reconstruction algorithms, including inverse problems, as well as array signal processing techniques.

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Researchers
Awards
- AWARD MERL’s Paper on Wi-Fi Sensing Earns Top 3% Paper Recognition at ICASSP 2023, Selected as a Best Student Paper Award Finalist
  Date: June 9, 2023
  Awarded to: Cristian J. Vaca-Rubio, Pu Wang, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Ye Wang, Petros Boufounos and Petar Popovski
  MERL Contacts: Petros T. Boufounos; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Pu (Perry) Wang; Ye Wang
  Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Computational Sensing, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Signal Processing
  Brief
  - A MERL Paper on Wi-Fi sensing was recognized as a Top 3% Paper among all 2709 accepted papers at the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2023). Co-authored by Cristian Vaca-Rubio and Petar Popovski from Aalborg University, Denmark, and MERL researchers Pu Wang, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Ye Wang, and Petros Boufounos, the paper "MmWave Wi-Fi Trajectory Estimation with Continous-Time Neural Dynamic Learning" was also a Best Student Paper Award finalist.
    
    Performed during Cristian’s stay at MERL first as a visiting Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow and then as a full-time intern in 2022, this work capitalizes on standards-compliant Wi-Fi signals to perform indoor localization and sensing. The paper uses a neural dynamic learning framework to address technical issues such as low sampling rate and irregular sampling intervals.
    
    ICASSP, a flagship conference of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS), was hosted on the Greek island of Rhodes from June 04 to June 10, 2023. ICASSP 2023 marked the largest ICASSP in history, boasting over 4000 participants and 6128 submitted papers, out of which 2709 were accepted.
- AWARD Joshua Rapp wins Best Dissertation Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society
  Date: December 20, 2021
  Awarded to: Joshua Rapp
  MERL Contact: Joshua Rapp
  Research Areas: Computational Sensing, Signal Processing
  Brief
  - Joshua Rapp has won the 2021 Best PhD Dissertation Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society.
    The award recognizes a PhD thesis completed on a signal processing subject within the past three years for its relevant work in signal processing while stimulating further research in the field.
    
    Dr. Rapp completed his PhD at Boston University in 2020 with a thesis entitled "Probabilistic Modeling for Single-Photon Lidar." The dissertation tackles challenges of the acquisition and processing of 3D depth maps reconstructed from time-of-flight data captured one photon at a time.
    The award will be presented at the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) in France.
- AWARD Petros Boufounos Elevated to IEEE Fellow
  Date: January 1, 2022
  Awarded to: Petros T. Boufounos
  MERL Contact: Petros T. Boufounos
  Research Areas: Computational Sensing, Signal Processing
  Brief
  - MERL’s Petros Boufounos has been elevated to IEEE Fellow, effective January 2022, for “contributions to compressed sensing.”
    
    IEEE Fellow is the highest grade of membership of the IEEE. It honors members with an outstanding record of technical achievements, contributing importantly to the advancement or application of engineering, science and technology, and bringing significant value to society. Each year, following a rigorous evaluation procedure, the IEEE Fellow Committee recommends a select group of recipients for elevation to IEEE Fellow. Less than 0.1% of voting members are selected annually for this member grade elevation.
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News & Events
- NEWS MERL Researchers at NeurIPS 2025 presented 2 conference papers, 5 workshop papers, and organized a workshop.
  Date: December 2, 2025 - December 7, 2025
  Where: San Diego
  MERL Contacts: Petros T. Boufounos; Anoop Cherian; Radu Corcodel; Stefano Di Cairano; Chiori Hori; Christopher R. Laughman; Suhas Anand Lohit; Pedro Miraldo; Saviz Mowlavi; Kuan-Chuan Peng; Arvind Raghunathan; Diego Romeres; Yuki Shirai; Abraham P. Vinod; Pu (Perry) Wang
  Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computational Sensing, Computer Vision, Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization, Robotics, Signal Processing, Speech & Audio
  Brief
  - MERL researchers presented 2 main-conference papers and 5 workshop papers, as well as organized a workshop, at NeurIPS 2025.
    
    Main Conference Papers:
    
    1) Sorachi Kato, Ryoma Yataka, Pu Wang, Pedro Miraldo, Takuya Fujihashi, and Petros Boufounos, "RAPTR: Radar-based 3D Pose Estimation using Transformer", Code available at: https://github.com/merlresearch/radar-pose-transformer
    
    2) Runyu Zhang, Arvind Raghunathan, Jeff Shamma, and Na Li, "Constrained Optimization From a Control Perspective via Feedback Linearization"
    
    Workshop Papers:
    
    1) Yuyou Zhang, Radu Corcodel, Chiori Hori, Anoop Cherian, and Ding Zhao, "SpinBench: Perspective and Rotation as a Lens on Spatial Reasoning in VLMs", NeuriIPS 2025 Workshop on SPACE in Vision, Language, and Embodied AI (SpaVLE) (Best Paper Runner-up)
    
    2) Xiaoyu Xie, Saviz Mowlavi, and Mouhacine Benosman, "Smooth and Sparse Latent Dynamics in Operator Learning with Jerk Regularization", Workshop on Machine Learning and the Physical Sciences (ML4PS)
    
    3) Spencer Hutchinson, Abraham Vinod, François Germain, Stefano Di Cairano, Christopher Laughman, and Ankush Chakrabarty, "Quantile-SMPC for Grid-Interactive Buildings with Multivariate Temporal Fusion Transformers", Workshop on UrbanAI: Harnessing Artificial Intelligence for Smart Cities (UrbanAI)
    
    4) Yuki Shirai, Kei Ota, Devesh Jha, and Diego Romeres, "Sim-to-Real Contact-Rich Pivoting via Optimization-Guided RL with Vision and Touch", Worskhop on Embodied World Models for Decision Making
    
    5) Mark Van der Merwe and Devesh Jha, "In-Context Policy Iteration for Dynamic Manipulation", Workshop on Embodied World Models for Decision Making
    
    Workshop Organized:
    
    MERL members co-organized the Multimodal Algorithmic Reasoning (MAR) Workshop (https://marworkshop.github.io/neurips25/). Organizers: Anoop Cherian (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Kuan-Chuan Peng (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Suhas Lohit (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Honglu Zhou (Salesforce AI Research), Kevin Smith (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Joshua B. Tenenbaum (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
- EVENT MERL Contributes to ICASSP 2025
  Date: Sunday, April 6, 2025 - Friday, April 11, 2025
  Location: Hyderabad, India
  MERL Contacts: Wael H. Ali; Petros T. Boufounos; Radu Corcodel; Chiori Hori; Siddarth Jain; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Jonathan Le Roux; Yanting Ma; Hassan Mansour; Yoshiki Masuyama; Joshua Rapp; Diego Romeres; Anthony Vetro; Pu (Perry) Wang; Gordon Wichern
  Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Computational Sensing, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning, Robotics, Signal Processing, Speech & Audio
  Brief
  - MERL has made numerous contributions to both the organization and technical program of ICASSP 2025, which is being held in Hyderabad, India from April 6-11, 2025.
    
    Sponsorship
    
    MERL is proud to be a Silver Patron of the conference and will participate in the student job fair on Thursday, April 10. Please join this session to learn more about employment opportunities at MERL, including openings for research scientists, post-docs, and interns.
    
    MERL is pleased to be the sponsor of two IEEE Awards that will be presented at the conference. We congratulate Prof. Björn Erik Ottersten, the recipient of the 2025 IEEE Fourier Award for Signal Processing, and Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan, the recipient of the 2025 IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award. Both awards will be presented in-person at ICASSP by Anthony Vetro, MERL President & CEO.
    
    Technical Program
    
    MERL is presenting 15 papers in the main conference on a wide range of topics including source separation, sound event detection, sound anomaly detection, speaker diarization, music generation, robot action generation from video, indoor airflow imaging, WiFi sensing, Doppler single-photon Lidar, optical coherence tomography, and radar imaging. Another paper on spatial audio will be presented at the Generative Data Augmentation for Real-World Signal Processing Applications (GenDA) Satellite Workshop.
    
    MERL Researchers Petros Boufounos and Hassan Mansour will present a Tutorial on “Computational Methods in Radar Imaging” in the afternoon of Monday, April 7.
    
    Petros Boufounos will also be giving an industry talk on Thursday April 10 at 12pm, on “A Physics-Informed Approach to Sensing".
    
    About ICASSP
    
    ICASSP is the flagship conference of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and the world's largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on the research advances and latest technological development in signal and information processing. The event has been attracting more than 4000 participants each year.
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Research Highlights
- mmWave Beam-SNR Fingerprinting (mmBSF)
Internships
See All Internships for Computational Sensing
Openings
- ST0175: Postdoctoral Research Fellow - Quantum Technologies
See All Openings at MERL
Recent Publications
- Joshi, A., Mowlavi, S., Benosman, M., "A dual ensemble Kalman filter approach to robust control of nonlinear systems: An application to partial differential equations", IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), December 2025.
  BibTeX TR2025-172 PDF
  - @inproceedings{Joshi2025dec,
  - author = {Joshi, Anant and Mowlavi, Saviz and Benosman, Mouhacine},
  - title = {{A dual ensemble Kalman filter approach to robust control of nonlinear systems: An application to partial differential equations}},
  - booktitle = {IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC)},
  - year = 2025,
  - month = dec,
  - url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-172}
  - }
- Xie, X., Mowlavi, S., Benosman, M., "Smooth and Sparse Latent Dynamics in Operator Learning with Jerk Regularization", Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) workshop on Machine Learning and the Physical Sciences (ML4PS), December 2025.
  BibTeX TR2025-166 PDF
  - @inproceedings{Xie2025dec,
  - author = {{{Xie, Xiaoyu and Mowlavi, Saviz and Benosman, Mouhacine}}},
  - title = {{{Smooth and Sparse Latent Dynamics in Operator Learning with Jerk Regularization}}},
  - booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) workshop on Machine Learning and the Physical Sciences (ML4PS)},
  - year = 2025,
  - month = dec,
  - url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-166}
  - }
- Yataka, R., Wang, P., Boufounos, P.T., Takahashi, R., "Radar-Conditioned 3D Bounding Box Diffusion for Indoor Human Perception", IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) Workshop, October 2025.
  BibTeX TR2025-154 PDF
  - @inproceedings{Yataka2025oct,
  - author = {Yataka, Ryoma and Wang, Pu and Boufounos, Petros T. and Takahashi, Ryuhei},
  - title = {{Radar-Conditioned 3D Bounding Box Diffusion for Indoor Human Perception}},
  - booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) Workshop},
  - year = 2025,
  - month = oct,
  - url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-154}
  - }
- Yataka, R., Wang, P., Boufounos, P.T., Takahashi, R., "End-to-End Radar Human Segmentation with Differentiable Positional Encoding", European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), DOI: 10.23919/EUSIPCO63237.2025.11226318, August 2025.
  BibTeX TR2025-125 PDF
  - @inproceedings{Yataka2025aug,
  - author = {Yataka, Ryoma and Wang, Pu and Boufounos, Petros T. and Takahashi, Ryuhei},
  - title = {End-to-End Radar Human Segmentation with Differentiable Positional Encoding},
  - booktitle = {European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO)},
  - year = 2025,
  - month = aug,
  - doi = {10.23919/EUSIPCO63237.2025.11226318},
  - isbn = {978-9-4645-9362-4},
  - url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-125}
  - }
- Zhang, X., Mowlavi, S., Benosman, M., Basar, T., "Policy Optimization for PDE Control with a Warm Start", American Control Conference (ACC), DOI: 10.23919/ACC63710.2025.11107977, July 2025, pp. 3539-3544.
  BibTeX TR2025-105 PDF
  - @inproceedings{Zhang2025jul,
  - author = {Zhang, Xiangyuan and Mowlavi, Saviz and Benosman, Mouhacine and Basar, Tamer},
  - title = {{Policy Optimization for PDE Control with a Warm Start}},
  - booktitle = {American Control Conference (ACC)},
  - year = 2025,
  - pages = {3539--3544},
  - month = jul,
  - publisher = {IEEE},
  - doi = {10.23919/ACC63710.2025.11107977},
  - url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-105}
  - }
- Santra, A., Wang, P., Shaker, G., Mysore, B.S., Dolmans, G., Chen, Y., Shariati, N., Pandharipande, A., "Machine Learning-Powered Radio Frequency Sensing: A Review", IEEE Sensors Journal, DOI: 10.1109/JSEN.2025.3547673, June 2025.
  BibTeX TR2025-099 PDF
  - @article{Santra2025jun,
  - author = {Santra, Avik and Wang, Pu and Shaker, George and Mysore, Bhavani Shankar and Dolmans, Guido and Chen, Yan and Shariati, Negin and Pandharipande, Ashish},
  - title = {{Machine Learning-Powered Radio Frequency Sensing: A Review}},
  - journal = {IEEE Sensors Journal},
  - year = 2025,
  - month = jun,
  - doi = {10.1109/JSEN.2025.3547673},
  - url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-099}
  - }
- Abdallah, A., Zhou, S., Wang, P., "IEEE 802.11bf Multistatic Sensing with Unsynchronized Receivers", IEEE Statistical Signal Processing Workshop (SSP), DOI: 10.1109/SSP64130.2025.11073500, June 2025.
  BibTeX TR2025-080 PDF
  - @inproceedings{Abdallah2025jun,
  - author = {Abdallah, Ayah and Zhou, Shengli and Wang, Pu},
  - title = {{IEEE 802.11bf Multistatic Sensing with Unsynchronized Receivers}},
  - booktitle = {IEEE Statistical Signal Processing Workshop (SSP)},
  - year = 2025,
  - month = jun,
  - doi = {10.1109/SSP64130.2025.11073500},
  - issn = {2693-3551},
  - isbn = {979-8-3315-1800-4},
  - url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-080}
  - }
- Teh, A., Ali, W.H., Rapp, J., Mansour, H., "Indoor Airflow Imaging Using Physics-Informed Background-Oriented Schlieren Tomography", International Symposium on Computational Sensing (ISCS), DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2509.14442, June 2025.
  BibTeX TR2025-071 PDF Video
  - @inproceedings{Teh2025jun,
  - author = {Teh, Arjun and Ali, Wael H. and Rapp, Joshua and Mansour, Hassan},
  - title = {{Indoor Airflow Imaging Using Physics-Informed Background-Oriented Schlieren Tomography}},
  - booktitle = {International Symposium on Computational Sensing (ISCS)},
  - year = 2025,
  - month = jun,
  - doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2509.14442},
  - url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-071}
  - }
See All Publications for Computational Sensing
Videos

[ICASSP 2025] Indoor Airflow Imaging Using Physics-Informed Schlieren Tomography

[MERL Seminar Series Spring 2025] The Emergence of Generalizability and Semantic Low-Dim Subspaces in Diffusion Models

[MERL Seminar Series Spring 2025] Imaging Dynamic Scenes from Seconds to Picoseconds

[CVPR 2024] SIRA: Scalable Inter-frame Relation and Association for Radar Perception

[MERL Seminar Series Spring 2024] Decoding Hidden Worlds: Unprecedented Sensing and Connectivity for Climate, Robotics, & Smart Environments

[GLOBECOM 2022/VCC 2023 Tutorial] Post-Deep Learning Era: Emerging Quantum Machine Learning for Sensing and Communications (Session 2)

[GLOBECOM 2022/VCC 2023 Tutorial] Post-Deep Learning Era: Emerging Quantum Machine Learning for Sensing and Communications (Session I)

[MERL Seminar Series Spring 2023] A Beginner’s Guide to Quantum Sensing Illustrated with Nitrogen Vacancy Centers in Diamond

Multiview Sensing with Unknown Permutations: An Optimal Transport Approach

Imaging for inverse scattering in Reflection Tomography

EMI reduction in PWM inverters using adaptive frequency modulated carriers

Through-the-Wall Imaging

Airflow Sensing

MERL Research on Autonomous Vehicles

Sensor Fusion
Software & Data Downloads