A Novel Technique for Wideband Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Radio Through Phase-Field Segmentation

The problem of wideband spectrum sensing for detecting vacant frequency subbands for opportunistic cognitive radio is investigated. This is achieved through the identification of irregularities (discontinuities) in the estimated power spectrum density. In this paper, we propose a new mathematical framework based on phase-field segmentation method, usually used in the image processing community. We show that by properly setting the parameters of the phase-field function, robustness to fluctuations of the edge threshold value (due to estimation errors for instance) used for spectrum sensing can be achieved. Our numerical results indicate that the sensing accuracy is improved, while the computational complexity is reduced, when compared to conventional methods.