
1
Generalized Matrix-Pencil Approach to Estimation
of Complex Exponentials with Gapped Data
Jianping Wang and Alexander Yarovoy
Abstract—A generalized matrix-pencil approach is proposed
for the estimation of complex exponential components with seg-
mented signal samples, which is very efficient and provides super-
resolution estimations. It is applicable to the signals sampled
segmentally with the same sampling frequency and direction of
arrival (DOA) estimation with distributed arrays within which
array elements are placed uniformly with the same inter-element
spacing.
Index Terms—Generalized Matrix Pencil Approach, Super-
resolution Estimation, Complex Exponential, Segmented Sam-
ples, Signal Estimation.
I. INTRODUCTION
Harmonic retrival problem is a general problem of estimat-
ing the frequencies and damping factors from the measure-
ments taken in time, space, etc. It is widely used in the field
of radar, sonar, communication, radio astronomy, and so on.
In the literature, the estimation approaches of un-
damped/damped exponential components which are gener-
ally developed based on parametric models. The existing
approaches are typically rely on the analysis of state-space of
measurements and are implemented via space-searching tech-
nique or search-free strategies. The classical space-searching
approaches include MUltiple SIgnal Classification (MUSIC),
the Amplitude and Phase EStimation method (APES) [1]
and the Iterative Adaptive Approach (IAA) [2] while typi-
cal search-free approaches contain the Estimation of Signal
Parameters via Rational Invariance Techniques (ESPRIT) al-
gorithm [3] and matrix pencil-type approaches [4]. All these
approaches have been extended to multidimensional cases for
various applications.
All the above approaches are developed for harmonic re-
trieval with continuously sampled data with a fixed sampling
interval. However, in practice, due to sensor failure, interfer-
ence or noise effect, memory constraint, etc, gapped signals are
frequently acquired as a few separate segments. In such cases,
the aforementioned estimation methods are not applicable due
to the break of certain structures implicitly used. To tackle this
problem, several methods have been introduced for harmonic
retrieval with gapped data [5]–[18]. In [7], the generalized
APES (GAPES) method was introduced to deal with the
gapped data based on Fourier basis grid search. For more
general missing data pattern, missing-data APES (MAPES)
[8] was developed using the expectation maximization (EM)
algorithm [8]. Meanwhile, the missing-data IAA (MIAA) [9]
The authors are with the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and
Computer Science (EEMCS), Delft University of Technology, Delft, 2628CD
the Netherlands e-mail: J.Wang-4@tudelft.nl, A.Yarovoy@tudelft.nl.
was introduced based on the IAA to estimate the harmonic
frequencies and the missing samples. Both MAPES and MIAA
are search-based methods but MIAA, as the author claimed,
is much faster than the MAPES. However, both methods have
difficulties in tackle damping harmonics estimation. On the
other hand, the weighted multiple invariance (WMI) approach
[14] was introduced based on a linear combination of the
rank-reduction criteria obtained shift-invariances of the signal
model. Using the MUSIC criterion, the WMI can in principle
get accurate estimation; however, the WMI based on poly-
nomial intersection is computationally very sensitive and not
stable. Moreover, similar to the MAPES, a Gaussian regression
method [16] is introduced for spectral estimation with missing
data based on the EM algorithm but it requires the power
spectral density sufficiently smooth.
In this paper, taking advantage of the search-free MPA,
we introduce the generalized MPA (GMPA) for estimating
harmonic components with gapped data. The proposed GMPA
exploits the shift-invariance of the signal space of the harmonic
components and utilize the singular value decomposition to
figure out the signal poles of the constructed Hankel-like ma-
trix. It is accurate and computational very efficient. Although
the propper approach has been directly used for signal fusion
in [17], [18], rigorous analysis was missing. To fill this gap,
a mathematical derivation is provided in this paper.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In
section II, the generic signal model for harmonic retrieval
with gapped data is presented and section III introduces the
proposed generalized matrix pencil approach. After that, some
numerical simulations are shown in section IV to demonstrate
the performance of the proposed GMPA and comparisons with
the state-of-the-art methods. Finally, conclusions are drawn in
section V.
II. SIGNAL MODEL
Signal estimation of damped/undamped complex exponen-
tial components is a popular problem in signal processing.
The damped/undamped complex exponential signal can be
generally expressed as
s(t) =
N
X
n=1
αnexp [(βn+jωn)t](1)
where j=√−1is the unit of imaginary number. αn,βnand
ωnare the amplitude, damping factor and angular frequency
of the nth complex exponential component, respectively. For
the undamped exponential components, their damping factor
are zero in (1).
arXiv:2210.15270v1 [eess.SP] 27 Oct 2022