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We study the problem of localizing a configuration of points and planes from the collection of point-to-plane distances. This problem models simultaneous localization and mapping from acoustic echoes as well as the notable "structure from sound" approach to microphone localization with unknown sources. In our earlier work we proposed computational methods for localization from point-to-plane distances and noted that such localization suffers from various ambiguities beyond the usual rigid body motions; in this paper we provide a complete characterization of uniqueness. We enumerate equivalence classes of configurations which lead to the same distance measurements as a function of the number of planes and points, and algebraically characterize the related transformations in both 2D and 3D. Here we only discuss uniqueness; computational tools and heuristics for practical localization from point-to-plane distances using sound will be addressed in a companion paper., Comment: 13 pages, 13 figures

In a variety of fields, in particular those involving imaging and optics, we often measure signals whose phase is missing or has been irremediably distorted. Phase retrieval attempts to recover the phase information of a signal from the magnitude of its Fourier transform to enable the reconstruction of the original signal. Solving the phase retrieval problem is equivalent to recovering a signal from its auto-correlation function. In this paper, we assume the original signal to be sparse; this is a natural assumption in many applications, such as X-ray crystallography, speckle imaging and blind channel estimation. We propose an algorithm that resolves the phase retrieval problem in three stages: i) we leverage the finite rate of innovation sampling theory to super-resolve the auto-correlation function from a limited number of samples, ii) we design a greedy algorithm that identifies the locations of a sparse solution given the super-resolved auto-correlation function, iii) we recover the amplitudes of the atoms given their locations and the measured auto-correlation function. Unlike traditional approaches that recover a discrete approximation of the underlying signal, our algorithm estimates the signal on a continuous domain, which makes it the first of its kind. Along with the algorithm, we derive its performance bound with a theoretical analysis and propose a set of enhancements to improve its computational complexity and noise resilience. Finally, we demonstrate the benefits of the proposed method via a comparison against Charge Flipping, a notable algorithm in crystallography.

We study simultaneous localization and mapping with a device that uses reflections to measure its distance from walls. Such a device can be realized acoustically with a synchronized collocated source and receiver; it behaves like a bat with no capacity for directional hearing or vocalizing. In this paper we generalize our previous work in 2D, and show that the 3D case is not just a simple extension, but rather a fundamentally different inverse problem. While generically the 2D problem has a unique solution, in 3D uniqueness is always absent in rooms with fewer than nine walls. In addition to the complete characterization of ambiguities which arise due to this non-uniqueness, we propose a robust solution for inexact measurements similar to analogous results for Euclidean Distance Matrices. Our theoretical results have important consequences for the design of collocated range-only SLAM systems, and we support them with an array of computer experiments., Comment: 5 pages, 8 figures, submitted to ICASSP 2017

We study the problem of simultaneously reconstructing a polygonal room and a trajectory of a device equipped with a (nearly) collocated omnidirectional source and receiver. The device measures arrival times of echoes of pulses emitted by the source and picked up by the receiver. No prior knowledge about the device's trajectory is required. Most existing approaches addressing this problem assume multiple sources or receivers, or they assume that some of these are static, serving as beacons. Unlike earlier approaches, we take into account the measurement noise and various constraints on the geometry by formulating the solution as a minimizer of a cost function similar to \emph{stress} in multidimensional scaling. We study uniqueness of the reconstruction from first-order echoes, and we show that in addition to the usual invariance to rigid motions, new ambiguities arise for important classes of rooms and trajectories. We support our theoretical developments with a number of numerical experiments., Comment: 5 pages, 6 figures, submitted to Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers Website