arXiv subjects

Jacopo Pegoraro

Publications and source records attributed to Jacopo Pegoraro.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Beyond Point Targets: Experimental Analysis of Frequency Anisotropy for Multi-band ISAC in FR3

As Integrated Sensing And Communication (ISAC) systems push toward higher sensing resolution, multi-band processing has emerged as a key enabler, with Frequency Range 3 (FR3) (7-24 GHz) standing out for its combination of wide bandwidth and favorable propagation. A common assumption underlying existing multi-band ISAC techniques is that targets behave as frequency-invariant point scatterers, enabling coherent combination of measurements across widely spaced subbands. However, this assumption does not hold over wide fractional bandwidths, since real objects exhibit frequency-dependent scattering mechanisms and migrating scattering centers. This paper provides the first systematic experimental characterization of the frequency anisotropy of everyday objects for ISAC, using channel measurements collected with a calibrated vector network analyzer over the 6-24 GHz band, across 10 objects and 120 viewpoints. We process bistatic channel impulse responses and synthetic aperture radar images to quantify multi-band coherence, extracting the real part of the cross-band correlation coefficient. Our results reveal complex, non-trivial coherence structures that vary substantially with object type and viewing angle, highlighting the need to account for frequency anisotropy in multi-band ISAC system design.

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arXiv2026

Hierarchical Coherent Imaging of Composite Anisotropic Moving Targets in ISAC

In Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) networks, distributed devices can cooperate to produce radio images of the surrounding environment by exploiting phase-coherent signal processing. However, existing imaging methods are not well-suited for composite moving targets with multiple independently moving extended parts. This is due to simplistic isotropic scattering models and the lack of methods to compensate for distinct Doppler shifts from each component, which leads to image defocusing. We propose MOSAIC, the first hierarchical imaging method for composite moving targets using distributed User Equipments (UEs) and a single ISAC Base Station (BS). MOSAIC generates high-resolution images of each target part and estimates its velocity vector. Coherent imaging is performed within selected clusters of UEs observing a locally isotropic scattering from each part, while cluster-specific images are combined non-coherently across wide angles to improve the reconstruction. To mitigate Doppler-induced defocusing, Doppler components are pre-compensated before coherent imaging, turning a limitation into an additional means of resolving multiple target parts. This also enables low-complexity velocity estimation by associating Doppler frequencies across UEs. Simulations show over 50% improvement in image quality compared to existing methods, in terms of Wasserstein distance, and dm/s-level velocity estimation accuracy.

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arXiv2026

Zero-Overhead Unambiguous Velocity Estimation in Multiband ISAC Systems Under Random Traffic

This paper proposes an original method for estimating the velocity of a target by leveraging the multiband capabilities of modern Integrated Sensing And Communication (ISAC) systems. Traditional Doppler estimation relies on regular sampling rates, but ISAC systems often face irregular packet arrival times because they reuse opportunistic communication traffic. This non-deterministic timing increases the risk of Doppler ambiguity and aliasing, degrading velocity estimation accuracy. To resolve this, we advocate exploiting frequency diversity across multiple carrier frequencies to observe Doppler shifts without imposing restrictions on packet timing or requiring dedicated sensing overhead. A multiband velocity estimation problem is here formulated as a mixed-integer quadratic program by utilizing phase differences from all possible pairwise packet combinations. By integrating at least one unambiguous phase measurement, the system can reconstruct the true target velocity even under sporadic traffic conditions. Simulation results using realistic traffic traces demonstrate that this approach significantly outperforms multiband likelihood-based and single-band algorithms, with accuracy improving as frequency separation between bands and inter-packet time intervals increase. This framework provides a zero-overhead solution for robust velocity estimation in dynamic ISAC environments.

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arXiv2026

Sparse Spike Encoding of Channel Responses for Energy Efficient Human Activity Recognition

ISAC enables pervasive monitoring, but modern sensing algorithms are often too complex for energy-constrained edge devices. This motivates the development of learning techniques that balance accuracy performance and energy efficiency. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are a promising alternative, processing information as sparse binary spike trains and potentially reducing energy consumption by orders of magnitude. In this work, we propose a spiking convolutional autoencoder (SCAE) that learns tailored spike-encoded representations of channel impulse responses (CIR), jointly trained with an SNN for human activity recognition (HAR), thereby eliminating the need for Doppler domain preprocessing. The results show that our SCAE-SNN achieves F1 scores comparable to a hybrid approach (almost 96%), while producing substantially sparser spike encoding (81.1% sparsity). We also show that encoding CIR data prior to classification improves both HAR accuracy and efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/ele-ciccia/SCAE-SNN-HAR.

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arXiv2026

Compressed Sensing-Driven Near-Field Localization Exploiting Array of Subarrays

Near-field localization for ISAC requires large-aperture arrays, making fully-digital implementations prohibitively complex and costly. While sparse subarray architectures can reduce cost, they introduce severe estimation ambiguity from grating lobes. To address both issues, we propose SHARE (Sparse Hierarchical Angle-Range Estimation), a novel two-stage sparse recovery algorithm. SHARE operates in two stages. It first performs coarse, unambiguous angle estimation using individual subarrays to resolve the grating lobe ambiguity. It then leverages the full sparse aperture to perform a localized joint angle-range search. This hierarchical approach avoids an exhaustive and computationally intensive two-dimensional grid search while preserving the high resolution of the large aperture. Simulation results show that SHARE significantly outperforms conventional one-shot sparse recovery methods, such as Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP), in both localization accuracy and robustness. Furthermore, we show that SHARE's overall localization accuracy is comparable to or even surpasses that of the fully-digital 2D-MUSIC algorithm, despite MUSIC having access to the complete, uncompressed data from every antenna element. SHARE therefore provides a practical path for high-resolution near-field ISAC systems.

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arXiv2026

AsyMov: Integrated Sensing and Communications with Asynchronous Moving Devices

Estimating the Doppler frequency shift caused by moving targets is one of the key objectives of Integrated Sensing And Communication (ISAC) systems, as it enables applications such as target classification, human activity recognition, and gait analysis. In practical scenarios, Doppler estimation is hindered by the movement of transmitter and receiver devices, and by the phase offsets caused by their clock asynchrony. Existing approaches have separately addressed these two aspects, either assuming clock-synchronous moving devices or asynchronous static ones. In fact, jointly tackling device motion and clock asynchrony is extremely challenging, as the Doppler shift from device movement differs for each propagation path and the phase offsets are time-varying. In this work, we present AsyMov, a method to estimate the bistatic Doppler frequency of a target and its velocity in ISAC setups featuring mobile and asynchronous devices. It leverages the channel impulse response at the receiver, by originally exploiting the invariance of phase offsets across propagation paths and the bistatic geometry, where the target Doppler and the device velocity are jointly estimated by a newly proposed alternating minimization algorithm. Moreover, it can be seamlessly integrated with device velocity measurements obtained from onboard sensors (if available), for enhanced reliability. Here, AsyMov is thoroughly characterized by way of theory (Cramér-Rao bound), simulation, and experiments, implementing it on an IEEE 802.11ay testbed and testing it on multiple setups in the 60 GHz and 28 GHz bands, including moving human subjects. Numerical and experimental results show superior performance against state-of-the-art methods and are on par with scenarios featuring static ISAC devices.

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arXiv2025

Toward Multiband Sensing in FR3: Frequency Anisotropy Characterization and Non-Contiguous Bands Aggregation Algorithms

Frequency Range 3 (FR3) in the 7-24 GHz band will be the new spectrum for 6G wireless networks. The bandwidth availability and diversity of FR3 offer unprecedented opportunities for coherent multiband Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC), which aggregates the carrier phase information from multiple frequency bands to increase the sensing resolution to the cm-level. However, the frequency anisotropy of sensing targets over GHz-wide bands and the non-contiguity of the 6G spectrum, pose critical challenges to the application of existing multiband ISAC techniques. We present the first study on coherent multiband sensing in FR3. We experimentally characterize the frequency anisotropy of targets and propose new phase coherence metrics for multiband processing. Then, we analyze the impact of non-contiguous FR3 bands considered by 3GPP, and design a new algorithm to mitigate the resulting sensing artifacts, outperforming existing techniques. Our results represent a first step toward fully developing multiband ISAC for FR3.

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arXiv2025

Spatiotemporal Radar Gesture Recognition with Hybrid Spiking Neural Networks: Balancing Accuracy and Efficiency

Radar-based Human Activity Recognition (HAR) offers privacy and robustness over camera-based methods, yet remains computationally demanding for edge deployment. We present the first use of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) for radar-based HAR on aircraft marshalling signal classification. Our novel hybrid architecture combines convolutional modules for spatial feature extraction with Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) neurons for temporal processing, inherently capturing gesture dynamics. The model reduces trainable parameters by 88\% with under 1\% accuracy loss compared to baselines, and generalizes well to the Soli gesture dataset. Through systematic comparisons with Artificial Neural Networks, we demonstrate the trade-offs of spiking computation in terms of accuracy, latency, memory, and energy, establishing SNNs as an efficient and competitive solution for radar-based HAR.

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arXiv2025

Open-Set Gait Recognition from Sparse mmWave Radar Point Clouds

The adoption of Millimeter-Wave (mmWave) radar devices for human sensing, particularly gait recognition, has recently gathered significant attention due to their efficiency, resilience to environmental conditions, and privacy-preserving nature. In this work, we tackle the challenging problem of Open-set Gait Recognition (OSGR) from sparse mmWave radar point clouds. Unlike most existing research, which assumes a closed-set scenario, our work considers the more realistic open-set case, where unknown subjects might be present at inference time, and should be correctly recognized by the system. Point clouds are well-suited for edge computing applications with resource constraints, but are more significantly affected by noise and random fluctuations than other representations, like the more common micro-Doppler signature. This is the first work addressing open-set gait recognition with sparse point cloud data. To do so, we propose a novel neural network architecture that combines supervised classification with unsupervised reconstruction of the point clouds, creating a robust, rich, and highly regularized latent space of gait features. To detect unknown subjects at inference time, we introduce a probabilistic novelty detection algorithm that leverages the structured latent space and offers a tunable trade-off between inference speed and prediction accuracy. Along with this paper, we release mmGait10, an original human gait dataset featuring over five hours of measurements from ten subjects, under varied walking modalities. Extensive experimental results show that our solution attains F1-Score improvements by 24% over state-of-the-art methods adapted for point clouds, on average, and across multiple openness levels.

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arXiv2025

LightSNN: Lightweight Architecture Search for Sparse and Accurate Spiking Neural Networks

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are highly regarded for their energy efficiency, inherent activation sparsity, and suitability for real-time processing in edge devices. However, most current SNN methods adopt architectures resembling traditional artificial neural networks (ANNs), leading to suboptimal performance when applied to SNNs. While SNNs excel in energy efficiency, they have been associated with lower accuracy levels than traditional ANNs when utilizing conventional architectures. In response, in this work we present LightSNN, a rapid and efficient Neural Network Architecture Search (NAS) technique specifically tailored for SNNs that autonomously leverages the most suitable architecture, striking a good balance between accuracy and efficiency by enforcing sparsity. Based on the spiking NAS network (SNASNet) framework, a cell-based search space including backward connections is utilized to build our training-free pruning-based NAS mechanism. Our technique assesses diverse spike activation patterns across different data samples using a sparsity-aware Hamming distance fitness evaluation. Thorough experiments are conducted on both static (CIFAR10 and CIFAR100) and neuromorphic datasets (DVS128-Gesture). Our LightSNN model achieves state-of-the-art results on CIFAR10 and CIFAR100, improves performance on DVS128Gesture by 4.49\%, and significantly reduces search time most notably offering a $98\times$ speedup over SNASNet and running 30\% faster than the best existing method on DVS128Gesture. Code is available on Github at: https://github.com/YesmineAbdennadher/LightSNN.

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arXiv2025

DISC: a Dataset for Integrated Sensing and Communication in mmWave Systems

This paper presents DISC, a dataset of millimeter-wave channel impulse response measurements for integrated human activity sensing and communication. This is the first dataset collected with a software-defined radio testbed that transmits 60 GHz IEEE 802-11ay-compliant packets and estimates the channel response including scattered signals off the moving body parts of subjects moving in an indoor environment. The provided data consists of three parts, for more than 2 hours of channel measurements with high temporal resolution (0.27 ms inter-packet time). DISC contains the contribution of 7 subjects performing 5 different activities, and includes data collected from two distinct environments. Unlike available radar-based millimeter-wave sensing datasets, our measurements are collected using uniform packet transmission times and sparse traffic patterns from real Wi-Fi deployments. We develop, train, and release open-source baseline algorithms based on DISC to perform human sensing tasks. Our results demonstrate that DISC can serve as a multi-purpose benchmarking tool for machine learning-based human activity recognition, radio frequency gait analysis, and sparse sensing algorithms for next-generation integrated sensing and communications.

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arXiv2024

Using Deep Reinforcement Learning to Enhance Channel Sampling Patterns in Integrated Sensing and Communication

In Integrated Sensing And Communication (ISAC) systems, estimating the micro-Doppler (mD) spectrogram of a target requires combining channel estimates retrieved from communication with ad-hoc sensing packets, which cope with the sparsity of the communication traffic. Hence, the mD quality depends on the transmission strategy of the sensing packets, which is still a challenging problem with no known solutions. In this letter, we design a deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework that fragments such a problem into a sequence of simpler decisions and takes advantage of the mD temporal evolution for maximizing the reconstruction performance. Our method is the first that learns sampling patterns to directly optimize the mD quality, enabling the adaptation of ISAC systems to variable communication traffic. We validate the proposed approach on a dataset of real channel measurements, reaching up to 40% higher mD reconstruction accuracy and several times lower computational complexity than state-of-the-art methods.

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arXiv2024

HiSAC: High-Resolution Sensing with Multiband Communication Signals

Integrated Sensing And Communication (ISAC ) systems are expected to perform accurate radar sensing while having minimal impact on communication. Ideally, sensing should only reuse communication resources, especially for spectrum which is contended by many applications. However, this poses a great challenge in that communication systems often operate on narrow subbands with low sensing resolution. Combining contiguous subbands has shown significant resolution gain in active localization. However, multiband ISAC remains unexplored due to communication subbands being highly sparse (non-contiguous) and affected by phase offsets that prevent their aggregation (incoherent). To tackle these problems, we design HiSAC, the first multiband ISAC system that combines diverse subbands across a wide frequency range to achieve super-resolved passive ranging. To solve the non-contiguity and incoherence of subbands, HiSAC combines them progressively, exploiting an anchor propagation path between transmitter and receiver in an optimization problem to achieve phase coherence. HiSAC fully reuses pilot signals in communication systems, it applies to different frequencies and can combine diverse technologies, e.g., 5G-NR and WiGig. We implement HiSAC on an experimental platform in the millimeter-wave unlicensed band and test it on objects and humans. Our results show it enhances the sensing resolution by up to 20 times compared to single-band processing while occupying the same spectrum.

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arXiv2024

Bistatic Doppler Frequency Estimation with Asynchronous Moving Devices for Integrated Sensing and Communications

In this letter, we present for the first time a method to estimate the bistatic Doppler frequency of a target with clock asynchronous and mobile Integrated Sensing And Communication (ISAC) devices. Existing approaches have separately tackled the presence of phase offsets due to clock asynchrony or the additional Doppler shift due to device movement. However, in real ISAC scenarios, these two sources of phase nuisance are concurrently present, making the estimation of the target's Doppler frequency particularly challenging. Our method solves the problem using the sole wireless signal at the receiver, exploiting the invariance of phase offsets across multipath components and the bistatic geometry in an original way. The proposed method is validated via simulation, exploring the impact of different system parameters. Numerical results show that our approach is a viable way of estimating Doppler frequency in bistatic asynchronous ISAC scenarios with mobile devices.

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arXiv2024

RAPID: Retrofitting IEEE 802.11ay Access Points for Indoor Human Detection and Sensing

In this work we present RAPID, the first joint communication and radar system based on next-generation IEEE 802.11ay WiFi networks operating in the 60 GHz band. Unlike existing approaches for human sensing at millimeter-wave frequencies, which rely on special-purpose radars, RAPID achieves radar-level sensing accuracy with IEEE 802.11ay access points, thus avoiding the burden of installing ad-hoc sensors. RAPID enables contactless human sensing applications, such as people tracking, Human Activity Recognition (HAR), and person identification without requiring modifications to the standard packet structure. Specifically, we leverage IEEE 802.11ay beam training to accurately localize and track multiple individuals within the same environment. Then, we propose a new way of using beam tracking to extract micro-Doppler signatures from the time-varying Channel Impulse Response (CIR) estimated from reflected packets. Such signatures are fed to a deep learning classifier to perform HAR and person identification. RAPID is implemented on a cutting-edge IEEE 802.11ay-compatible FPGA platform with phased antenna arrays, and evaluated on a large dataset of CIR measurements. It is robust across different environments and subjects, and outperforms state-of-the-art sub-6 GHz WiFi sensing techniques. Using two access points, RAPID reliably tracks multiple subjects, reaching HAR and person identification accuracies of 94% and 90%, respectively.

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arXiv2024

Sensing in Bi-Static ISAC Systems with Clock Asynchronism: A Signal Processing Perspective

Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) has been identified as a pillar usage scenario for the impending 6G era. Bi-static sensing, a major type of sensing in ISAC, is promising to expedite ISAC in the near future, as it requires minimal changes to the existing network infrastructure. However, a critical challenge for bi-static sensing is clock asynchronism due to the use of different clocks at far-separated transmitters and receivers. This causes the received signal to be affected by time-varying random phase offsets, severely degrading, or even failing, direct sensing. Hence, to effectively enable ISAC, considerable research has been directed toward addressing the clock asynchronism issue in bi-static sensing. This paper provides an overview of the issue and existing techniques developed in an ISAC background. Based on the review and comparison, we also draw insights into the future research directions and open problems, aiming to nurture the maturation of bi-static sensing in ISAC.

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arXiv2024

JUMP: Joint communication and sensing with Unsynchronized transceivers Made Practical

Wideband millimeter-wave communication systems can be extended to provide radar-like sensing capabilities on top of data communication, in a cost-effective manner. However, the development of joint communication and sensing technology is hindered by practical challenges, such as occlusions to the line-of-sight path and clock asynchrony between devices. The latter introduces time-varying timing and frequency offsets that prevent the estimation of sensing parameters and, in turn, the use of standard signal processing solutions. Existing approaches cannot be applied to commonly used phased-array receivers, as they build on stringent assumptions about the multipath environment, and are computationally complex. We present JUMP, the first system enabling practical bistatic and asynchronous joint communication and sensing, while achieving accurate target tracking and micro-Doppler extraction in realistic conditions. Our system compensates for the timing offset by exploiting the channel correlation across subsequent packets. Further, it tracks multipath reflections and eliminates frequency offsets by observing the phase of a dynamically-selected static reference path. JUMP has been implemented on a 60 GHz experimental platform, performing extensive evaluations of human motion sensing, including non-line-of-sight scenarios. In our results, JUMP attains comparable tracking performance to a full-duplex monostatic system and similar micro-Doppler quality with respect to a phase-locked bistatic receiver.

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arXiv2024

Attention-Refined Unrolling for Sparse Sequential micro-Doppler Reconstruction

The reconstruction of micro-Doppler signatures of human movements is a key enabler for fine-grained activity recognition wireless sensing. In Joint Communication and Sensing (JCS) systems, unlike in dedicated radar sensing systems, a suitable trade-off between sensing accuracy and communication overhead has to be attained. It follows that the micro-Doppler has to be reconstructed from incomplete windows of channel estimates obtained from communication packets. Existing approaches exploit compressed sensing, but produce very poor reconstructions when only a few channel measurements are available, which is often the case with real communication patterns. In addition, the large number of iterations they need to converge hinders their use in real-time systems. In this work, we propose and validate STAR, a neural network that reconstructs micro-Doppler sequences of human movement even from highly incomplete channel measurements. STAR is based upon a new architectural design that combines a single unrolled iterative hard-thresholding layer with an attention mechanism, used at its output. This results in an interpretable and lightweight architecture that reaps the benefits of both model-based and data driven solutions. STAR is evaluated on a public JCS dataset of 60 GHz channel measurements of human activity traces. Experimental results show that it substantially outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in terms of the reconstructed micro-Doppler quality. Remarkably, STAR enables human activity recognition with satisfactory accuracy even with 90% of missing channel measurements, for which existing techniques fail.

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