Researchers from the Instituto de Telecomunicações (IT) have received the IET Optoelectronics Best Paper Award at the 2026 International Symposium on Communication Systems, Networks and Digital Signal Processing (CSNDSP 2026), held in Edinburgh.
The award recognises the paper “Group-Regularized Atomic Norm Minimization for Widely Separated MIMO Radar”, authored by Diogo Santos, Daniel Castanheira, Adão Silva and Atílio Gameiro, for its contribution to target localisation in widely separated MIMO radar systems.
The work proposes a new method, Group-Regularized Atomic Norm Minimization (GRAN), designed to improve target localisation in distributed MIMO radar configurations. The approach combines continuous-domain signal estimation with information shared across multiple spatially distributed receivers.
By avoiding the discretisation of the target-location space, the method can reduce errors associated with conventional grid-based approaches. At the same time, the use of information from multiple receivers enables GRAN to exploit the overall geometry of the radar system, improving localisation accuracy and robustness.
These advantages are particularly relevant in scenarios where only a limited number of signal samples are available, a common challenge in practical radar applications.
The recognition at CSNDSP 2026 highlights the contribution of IT researchers to the development of advanced signal processing and radar technologies, with potential applications in distributed sensing and next-generation radar systems.