Signal Processing

Acquisition and processing of information.

Our research in the area of signal processing encompasses a wide range of work in the areas of communications, sensing, estimation, localization, and speech and visual information processing. We explore novel approaches for signal acquisition and coding, methods to filter and recover signals in the presence of noise and other degrading factors, and techniques that infer meaning from the processed signals.

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  • Researchers

  • Awards

    •  AWARD    Best paper award at PHMAP 2023
      Date: September 14, 2023
      Awarded to: Dehong Liu, Anantaram Varatharajan, and Abraham Goldsmith
      MERL Contacts: Abraham Goldsmith; Dehong Liu
      Research Areas: Electric Systems, Signal Processing
      Brief
      • MERL researchers Dehong Liu, Anantaram Varatharajan, and Abraham Goldsmith were awarded one of three best paper awards at Asia Pacific Conference of the Prognostics and Health Management Society 2023 (PHMAP23) held in Tokyo from September 11th to 14th, 2023, for their co-authored paper titled 'Extracting Broken-Rotor-Bar Fault Signature of Varying-Speed Induction Motors.'

        PHMAP is a biennial international conference specialized in prognostics and health management. PHMAP23 attracted more than 300 attendees from worldwide and published more than 160 regular papers from academia and industry including aerospace, production, civil engineering, electronics, and so on.
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    •  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.
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    •  AWARD    Best Paper Award of 2022 IPSJ Transactions on Consumer Devices & Systems
      Date: March 27, 2023
      Awarded to: Yukimasa Nagai, Takenori Sumi, Jianlin Guo, Philip Orlik, Hiroshi Mineno
      MERL Contacts: Jianlin Guo; Philip V. Orlik; Kieran Parsons
      Research Areas: Communications, Signal Processing
      Brief
      • MELCO/MERL research paper “IEEE 802.19.3 Standardization for Coexistence of IEEE 802.11ah and IEEE 802.15.4g Systems in Sub-1GHz Frequency Bands” has won the Best Paper Award of the 2022 IPSJ Transactions on Consumer Devices and Systems. The Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ) award was established in 1970 and is conferred on the authors of particularly excellent papers, which are published in the IPSJ journals and transactions. Our paper was published by the IPSJ Transaction on Consumer Device and System Vol. 29 in 2021 and authors are Yukimasa Nagai, Takenori Sumi, Jianlin Guo, Philip Orlik and Hiroshi Mineno.
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  • News & Events

    •  NEWS    MERL Researchers to Present 2 Conference and 11 Workshop Papers at NeurIPS 2024
      Date: December 10, 2024 - December 15, 2024
      Where: Advances in Neural Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
      MERL Contacts: Petros T. Boufounos; Matthew Brand; Ankush Chakrabarty; Anoop Cherian; François Germain; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Christopher R. Laughman; Jonathan Le Roux; Jing Liu; Suhas Lohit; Tim K. Marks; Yoshiki Masuyama; Kieran Parsons; Kuan-Chuan Peng; Diego Romeres; Pu (Perry) Wang; Ye Wang; Gordon Wichern
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Computational Sensing, Computer Vision, Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization, Robotics, Signal Processing, Speech & Audio, Human-Computer Interaction, Information Security
      Brief
      • MERL researchers will attend and present the following papers at the 2024 Advances in Neural Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Conference and Workshops.

        1. "RETR: Multi-View Radar Detection Transformer for Indoor Perception" by Ryoma Yataka (Mitsubishi Electric), Adriano Cardace (Bologna University), Perry Wang (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Petros Boufounos (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Ryuhei Takahashi (Mitsubishi Electric). Main Conference. https://neurips.cc/virtual/2024/poster/95530

        2. "Evaluating Large Vision-and-Language Models on Children's Mathematical Olympiads" by Anoop Cherian (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Kuan-Chuan Peng (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Suhas Lohit (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Joanna Matthiesen (Math Kangaroo USA), Kevin Smith (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Josh Tenenbaum (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Main Conference, Datasets and Benchmarks track. https://neurips.cc/virtual/2024/poster/97639

        3. "Probabilistic Forecasting for Building Energy Systems: Are Time-Series Foundation Models The Answer?" by Young-Jin Park (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Jing Liu (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), François G Germain (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Ye Wang (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Toshiaki Koike-Akino (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Gordon Wichern (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Navid Azizan (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Christopher R. Laughman (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Ankush Chakrabarty (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories). Time Series in the Age of Large Models Workshop.

        4. "Forget to Flourish: Leveraging Model-Unlearning on Pretrained Language Models for Privacy Leakage" by Md Rafi Ur Rashid (Penn State University), Jing Liu (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Toshiaki Koike-Akino (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Shagufta Mehnaz (Penn State University), Ye Wang (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories). Workshop on Red Teaming GenAI: What Can We Learn from Adversaries?

        5. "Spatially-Aware Losses for Enhanced Neural Acoustic Fields" by Christopher Ick (New York University), Gordon Wichern (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Yoshiki Masuyama (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), François G Germain (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Jonathan Le Roux (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories). Audio Imagination Workshop.

        6. "FV-NeRV: Neural Compression for Free Viewpoint Videos" by Sorachi Kato (Osaka University), Takuya Fujihashi (Osaka University), Toshiaki Koike-Akino (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Takashi Watanabe (Osaka University). Machine Learning and Compression Workshop.

        7. "GPT Sonography: Hand Gesture Decoding from Forearm Ultrasound Images via VLM" by Keshav Bimbraw (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), Ye Wang (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Jing Liu (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Toshiaki Koike-Akino (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories). AIM-FM: Advancements In Medical Foundation Models: Explainability, Robustness, Security, and Beyond Workshop.

        8. "Smoothed Embeddings for Robust Language Models" by Hase Ryo (Mitsubishi Electric), Md Rafi Ur Rashid (Penn State University), Ashley Lewis (Ohio State University), Jing Liu (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Toshiaki Koike-Akino (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Kieran Parsons (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Ye Wang (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories). Safe Generative AI Workshop.

        9. "Slaying the HyDRA: Parameter-Efficient Hyper Networks with Low-Displacement Rank Adaptation" by Xiangyu Chen (University of Kansas), Ye Wang (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Matthew Brand (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Pu Wang (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Jing Liu (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Toshiaki Koike-Akino (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories). Workshop on Adaptive Foundation Models.

        10. "Preference-based Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization with Gradients" by Joshua Hang Sai Ip (University of California Berkeley), Ankush Chakrabarty (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Ali Mesbah (University of California Berkeley), Diego Romeres (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories). Workshop on Bayesian Decision-Making and Uncertainty. Lightning talk spotlight.

        11. "TR-BEACON: Shedding Light on Efficient Behavior Discovery in High-Dimensions with Trust-Region-based Bayesian Novelty Search" by Wei-Ting Tang (Ohio State University), Ankush Chakrabarty (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Joel A. Paulson (Ohio State University). Workshop on Bayesian Decision-Making and Uncertainty.

        12. "MEL-PETs Joint-Context Attack for the NeurIPS 2024 LLM Privacy Challenge Red Team Track" by Ye Wang (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Tsunato Nakai (Mitsubishi Electric), Jing Liu (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Toshiaki Koike-Akino (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Kento Oonishi (Mitsubishi Electric), Takuya Higashi (Mitsubishi Electric). LLM Privacy Challenge. Special Award for Practical Attack.

        13. "MEL-PETs Defense for the NeurIPS 2024 LLM Privacy Challenge Blue Team Track" by Jing Liu (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Ye Wang (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Toshiaki Koike-Akino (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Tsunato Nakai (Mitsubishi Electric), Kento Oonishi (Mitsubishi Electric), Takuya Higashi (Mitsubishi Electric). LLM Privacy Challenge. Won 3rd Place Award.

        MERL members also contributed to the organization of the Multimodal Algorithmic Reasoning (MAR) Workshop (https://marworkshop.github.io/neurips24/). Organizers: Anoop Cherian (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Kuan-Chuan Peng (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Suhas Lohit (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Honglu Zhou (Salesforce Research), Kevin Smith (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Tim K. Marks (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Juan Carlos Niebles (Salesforce AI Research), Petar Veličković (Google DeepMind).
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    •  NEWS    Jianlin Guo delivered a keynote in IEEE ICC 2024 Workshop
      Date: June 13, 2024
      Where: IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC)
      MERL Contacts: Jianlin Guo; Philip V. Orlik; Kieran Parsons; Pu (Perry) Wang
      Research Areas: Communications, Machine Learning, Signal Processing
      Brief
      • Jianlin Guo delivered a keynote titled "Private IoT Networks" in the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) 2024 Workshop "Industrial Private 5G-and-Beyond Wireless Networks", held in Denver, Colorado from June 9-13. The ICC is one of two IEEE Communications Society’s flagship conferences.

        Abstract: With the advent of private 5G-and-Beyond communication technologies, private IoT networks have been emerging. In private IoT networks, network owners have full control on the network resource management. However, to fully realize private IoT networks, the upper layer technologies need to be developed as well. This keynote presents machine learning based anomaly detection in manufacturing systems, innovative multipath TCP technologies over heterogeneous wireless IoT networks, novel channel resource scheduling in private 5G networks and efficient wireless coexistence of the heterogeneous wireless systems.
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  • Research Highlights

  • Internships

    • EA0070: Internship - Multi-modal sensor fusion

      MERL is looking for a self-motivated intern to work on multi-modal sensor fusion for health condition monitoring and predictive maintenance of motor drive systems. The ideal candidate would be a Ph.D. candidate in electrical engineering or computer science with solid research background in signal processing and machine learning. Experience in motor drive system is a plus. The intern is expected to collaborate with MERL researchers to collect data, explore multi-modal data relationship, and prepare manuscripts for publications. The total duration is anticipated to be 3 months and the start date is flexible.

      Required Specific Experience

      • Experience with multi-modal sensor fusion.

    • CI0067: Internship - IoT Network Design methodology

      MERL is seeking a highly motivated and qualified intern to carry out research on mobile IoT network design methodology. The candidate is expected to develop innovative mobile network technologies to support UAV assisted IoT networks. The candidates should have knowledge of mobile network technologies such as path planning and cooperative network operations. Knowledge of UAV technology and mobility management is a plus. Candidates in their junior or senior years of a Ph.D. program are encouraged to apply. Start date for this internship is flexible and the duration is 3 months.

      The responsibilities of this intern position include (i) research on UAV assisted network design methodology; (ii) develop network configuration technologies to support UAV cooperative network operations; (iii) simulate and analyze the performance of developed technology.

    • ST0096: Internship - Multimodal Tracking and Imaging

      MERL is seeking a motivated intern to assist in developing hardware and algorithms for multimodal imaging applications. The project involves integration of radar, camera, and depth sensors in a variety of sensing scenarios. The ideal candidate should have experience with FMCW radar and/or depth sensing, and be fluent in Python and scripting methods. Familiarity with optical tracking of humans and experience with hardware prototyping is desired. Good knowledge of computational imaging and/or radar imaging methods is a plus.

      Required Specific Experience

      • Experience with Python and Python Deep Learning Frameworks.
      • Experience with FMCW radar and/or Depth Sensors.


    See All Internships for Signal Processing

  • Recent Publications

    •  Berntorp, K., Greiff, M., "A Framework for Joint Vehicle Localization and Road Mapping Using Onboard Sensors", Control Engineering Practice, November 2024.
      BibTeX TR2024-163 PDF
      • @article{Berntorp2024nov,
      • author = {Berntorp, Karl and Greiff, Marcus}},
      • title = {A Framework for Joint Vehicle Localization and Road Mapping Using Onboard Sensors},
      • journal = {Control Engineering Practice},
      • year = 2024,
      • month = nov,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-163}
      • }
    •  Liu, D., Wang, Y., Shinya, T., "A Sparsity-Driven Method to Iteratively Extract Motor Fault Signatures in Varying-Speed Operations", International Conference on Electrical Machines and Systems (ICEMS), November 2024.
      BibTeX TR2024-162 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Liu2024nov,
      • author = {Liu, Dehong and Wang, Yebin and Shinya, Tsurutashin}},
      • title = {A Sparsity-Driven Method to Iteratively Extract Motor Fault Signatures in Varying-Speed Operations},
      • booktitle = {International Conference on Electrical Machines and Systems (ICEMS)},
      • year = 2024,
      • month = nov,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-162}
      • }
    •  Yataka, R., Cardace, A., Wang, P., Boufounos, P.T., Takahashi, R., "RETR: Multi-View Radar Detection Transformer for Indoor Perception", Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), November 2024.
      BibTeX TR2024-159 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Yataka2024nov3,
      • author = {Yataka, Ryoma and Cardace, Adriano and Wang, Pu and Boufounos, Petros T. and Takahashi, Ryuhei}},
      • title = {RETR: Multi-View Radar Detection Transformer for Indoor Perception},
      • booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)},
      • year = 2024,
      • month = nov,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-159}
      • }
    •  Sholokhov, A., Nabi, S., Rapp, J., Brunton, S., Kutz, N., Boufounos, P.T., Mansour, H., "Single-pixel imaging of spatio-temporal flows using differentiable latent dynamics", IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging, October 2024.
      BibTeX TR2024-151 PDF
      • @article{Sholokhov2024oct,
      • author = {{Sholokhov, Aleksei and Nabi, Saleh and Rapp, Joshua and Brunton, Steven and Kutz, Nathan and Boufounos, Petros T. and Mansour, Hassan}},
      • title = {Single-pixel imaging of spatio-temporal flows using differentiable latent dynamics},
      • journal = {IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging},
      • year = 2024,
      • month = oct,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-151}
      • }
    •  Shimane, Y., Ho, K., Weiss, A., "Autonomous Horizon-Based Optical Navigation on Near-Planar Cislunar Libration Point Orbits", 4th Space Imaging Workshop, October 2024.
      BibTeX TR2024-139 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Shimane2024oct,
      • author = {Shimane, Yuri and Ho, Koki and Weiss, Avishai}},
      • title = {Autonomous Horizon-Based Optical Navigation on Near-Planar Cislunar Libration Point Orbits},
      • booktitle = {4th Space Imaging Workshop},
      • year = 2024,
      • month = oct,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-139}
      • }
    •  Sanz-Gorrachategui, I., Wang, Y., Guillen-Asenio, A., Bono-Nuez, A., Martín-del-Brío, B., Orlik, P.V., Pastor-Flores, P., "Remaining Useful Life Estimation of Used Li-Ion Cells with Deep Learning Algorithms without First Life Information", IEEE Access, October 2024.
      BibTeX TR2024-155 PDF
      • @article{Sanz-Gorrachategui2024oct,
      • author = {Sanz-Gorrachategui, Ivan and Wang, Ye and Guillen-Asenio, Alejandro and Bono-Nuez, Antonio and Martín-del-Brío, Bonifacio and Orlik, Philip V. and Pastor-Flores, Pablo}},
      • title = {Remaining Useful Life Estimation of Used Li-Ion Cells with Deep Learning Algorithms without First Life Information},
      • journal = {IEEE Access},
      • year = 2024,
      • month = oct,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-155}
      • }
    •  Jin, S., Wang, P., Boufounos, P.T., Orlik, P.V., Takahashi, R., Roy, S., "Spatial-Domain Mutual Interference Mitigation for MIMO-FMCW Automotive Radar", IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, DOI: 10.1109/​TVT.2024.3467917, September 2024.
      BibTeX TR2024-148 PDF
      • @article{Jin2024sep,
      • author = {Jin, Sian and Wang, Pu and Boufounos, Petros T. and Orlik, Philip V. and Takahashi, Ryuhei and Roy, Sumit}},
      • title = {Spatial-Domain Mutual Interference Mitigation for MIMO-FMCW Automotive Radar},
      • journal = {IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology},
      • year = 2024,
      • month = sep,
      • doi = {10.1109/TVT.2024.3467917},
      • issn = {1939-9359},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-148}
      • }
    •  Romero, O., Benosman, M., Pappas, G., "From Convexity to Strong Convexity and Beyond: Bridging The Gap In Convergence Rates", IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), September 2024.
      BibTeX TR2024-131 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Romero2024sep,
      • author = {Romero, Orlando and Benosman, Mouhacine and Pappas, George}},
      • title = {From Convexity to Strong Convexity and Beyond: Bridging The Gap In Convergence Rates},
      • booktitle = {IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC)},
      • year = 2024,
      • month = sep,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-131}
      • }
    See All Publications for Signal Processing

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