Multichannel Sampling with Unknown Gains and Offsets: A Fast Reconstruction Algorithm

We study a multichannel sampling scheme, where different channels observe scaled and shifted versions of a common bandlimited signal. The channel gains and offsets are unknown a priori, and each channel samples at sub-Nyquist rates. This setup appears in many practical signal processing applications, including time-interleaved ADC with timing skews, unsynchronized distributed sampling in sensor networks, and superresolution imaging. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm to efficiently estimate the unknown channel gains and offsets. Key to our algorithm is a novel linearization technique, which converts a system of trigonometric polynomial equations of the unknown parameters to an overparameterized linear system. The computation steps of the proposed algorithm boil down to forming a fixed data matrix from the discrete-time Fourier transforms of the observed channel samples and computing the singular value decomposition of that matrix. Numerical simulations verify the effectiveness, efficiency, and robustness of the proposed algorithm in the presence of noise. In the high SNR regime (40 dB and above), the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms a previous method in the literature in terms of estimation accuracy, at the same time being three orders of magnitudes faster.