Monitoring highly dynamic environments is a difficult task when the changes within the systems require high speed monitoring systems. An active sensing system has to solve the problem of overlapped responses coming from different parts of the surveyed environment. Thus, the need of a new representation space which separates the overlapped responses, is mandatory. This paper describes two new concepts for high speed active sensing systems. On the emitter side, we propose a phase-space-based waveform design that presents a unique shape in the phase space, which can be easily converted into a real signal. We call it phase space lobe. The instantaneous frequency (IF) law of the emitted signal is found inside the time series. The main advantage of this new concept is its capability to generate several distinct signals, non-orthogonal in the time/frequency domain but orthogonal within the representation space, namely the phase diagram. On the receiver side, the IF law information is estimated in the phase diagram representation domain by quantifying the recurrent states of the system. This waveform design technique gives the possibility to develop the high speed sensing methods, adapted for monitoring complex dynamic phenomena In our paper, as an applicative context, we consider the problem of estimating the time of flight in an dynamic acoustic environment. In this context, we show through experimental trials that our approach provides three times more accurate estimation of time of flight than spectrogram based technique. This very good accuracy comes from the capability of our approach to generate separable IF law components as well as from the quantification in phase diagram, both of them being the key element of our approach for high speed sensing.
Keywords: dynamic phenomena; instantaneous frequency law tracking; phase space diagram; phase space lobe; recurrence quantification analysis.