Multichannel Frequency Estimation with Constant Amplitude via Convex Structured Low-Rank Approximation

We study the problem of estimating the frequencies of several complex sinusoids with constant amplitude (CA) (also called constant modulus) from multichannel signals of their superposition. To exploit the CA property for frequency estimation in the framework of atomic norm minimization (ANM), we introduce multiple positive-semidefinite block matrices composed of Hankel and Toeplitz submatrices and formulate the ANM problem as a convex structured low-rank approximation (SLRA) problem. The proposed SLRA is a semidefinite programming and has substantial differences from existing such formulations without using the CA property. The proposed approach is termed as SLRA-based ANM for CA frequency estimation (SACA). We provide theoretical guarantees and extensive simulations that validate the advantages of SACA.