Alternating projections gridless covariance-based estimation for DOA

We present a gridless sparse iterative covariance-based estimation method based on alternating projections for direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation. The gridless DOA estimation is formulated in the reconstruction of Toeplitz-structured low rank matrix, and is solved efficiently with alternating projections. The method improves resolution by achieving sparsity, deals with single-snapshot data and coherent arrivals, and, with co-prime arrays, estimates more DOAs than the number of sensors. We evaluate the proposed method using simulation results focusing on co-prime arrays.Comment: 5 pages, accepted by (ICASSP 2021) 2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processin

Gridless Evolutionary Approach for Line Spectral Estimation with Unknown Model Order

Gridless methods show great superiority in line spectral estimation. These methods need to solve an atomic $l_0$ norm (i.e., the continuous analog of $l_0$ norm) minimization problem to estimate frequencies and model order. Since this problem is NP-hard to compute, relaxations of atomic $l_0$ norm, such as nuclear norm and reweighted atomic norm, have been employed for promoting sparsity. However, the relaxations give rise to a resolution limit, subsequently leading to biased model order and convergence error. To overcome the above shortcomings of relaxation, we propose a novel idea of simultaneously estimating the frequencies and model order by means of the atomic $l_0$ norm. To accomplish this idea, we build a multiobjective optimization model. The measurment error and the atomic $l_0$ norm are taken as the two optimization objectives. The proposed model directly exploits the model order via the atomic $l_0$ norm, thus breaking the resolution limit. We further design a variable-length evolutionary algorithm to solve the proposed model, which includes two innovations. One is a variable-length coding and search strategy. It flexibly codes and interactively searches diverse solutions with different model orders. These solutions act as steppingstones that help fully exploring the variable and open-ended frequency search space and provide extensive potentials towards the optima. Another innovation is a model order pruning mechanism, which heuristically prunes less contributive frequencies within the solutions, thus significantly enhancing convergence and diversity. Simulation results confirm the superiority of our approach in both frequency estimation and model order selection.Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibl

Efficient direction of arrival estimation based on sparse covariance fitting criterion with modeling mismatch

This paper studies direction of arrival (DoA) estimation with an antenna array using sparse signal reconstruction (SSR). Among the existing SSR methods, the sparse covariance fitting based algorithms, which can estimate source power and noise variance naturally, are most promising. Nevertheless, they are either on-grid model based methods whose performance are sensitive to off-grid DoAs or gridless methods which are computationally demanding. In this paper, we propose an off-grid DoA estimation algorithm based on the sparse covariance fitting criterion. We first consider a scenario in which the number of snapshots is larger than the array size. An algorithm is proposed by applying an off-grid model, which takes into account the deviations between the discretized sampling grid and the true DoAs, to the sparse covariance fitting criterion. It estimates the on-grid parameters and the deviations of off-grid DoAs separately and thus is computationally efficient to implement. Then in the case where the number of snapshots is smaller than the array size, we propose to execute the DoA estimation algorithm iteratively under the stochastic maximum likelihood (SML) criterion. The estimation accuracy and computational efficiency of the proposed algorithms are demonstrated by computer simulations

A discretization-free sparse and parametric approach for linear array signal processing

Direction of arrival (DOA) estimation in array processing using uniform/sparse linear arrays is concerned in this paper. While sparse methods via approximate parameter discretization have been popular in the past decade, the discretization may cause problems, e.g., modeling error and increased computations due to dense sampling. In this paper, an exact discretization-free method, named as sparse and parametric approach (SPA), is proposed for uniform and sparse linear arrays. SPA carries out parameter estimation in the continuous range based on well-established covariance fitting criteria and convex optimization. It guarantees to produce a sparse parameter estimate without discretization required by existing sparse methods. Theoretical analysis shows that the SPA parameter estimator is a large-snapshot realization of the maximum likelihood estimator and is statistically consistent (in the number of snapshots) under uncorrelated sources. Other merits of SPA include improved resolution, applicability to arbitrary number of snapshots, robustness to correlation of the sources and no requirement of user-parameters. Numerical simulations are carried out to verify our analysis and demonstrate advantages of SPA compared to existing methods