Sparsity-based Collaborative Sensing in a Scalable Wireless Network

In this paper, we propose a collaborative sensing scheme for source localization and imaging in an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) network. A two-stage image formation approach, which combines the robust adaptive beamforming technique and sparsity-based reconstruction strategy, is proposed to achieve accurate multi-source localization. In order to minimize the communication traffic in the UAV network, each UAV node only transmits the coarse-resolution image, in lieu of the large volume of raw sampled data. The proposed method maintains the robustness in the presence of model mismatch while providing a high-resolution image.