A Compact Formulation for the ℓ2,1\ell_{2,1} Mixed-Norm Minimization Problem

Parameter estimation from multiple measurement vectors (MMVs) is a fundamental problem in many signal processing applications, e.g., spectral analysis and direction-of- arrival estimation. Recently, this problem has been address using prior information in form of a jointly sparse signal structure. A prominent approach for exploiting joint sparsity considers mixed-norm minimization in which, however, the problem size grows with the number of measurements and the desired resolution, respectively. In this work we derive an equivalent, compact reformulation of the $\ell_{2,1}$ mixed-norm minimization problem which provides new insights on the relation between different existing approaches for jointly sparse signal reconstruction. The reformulation builds upon a compact parameterization, which models the row-norms of the sparse signal representation as parameters of interest, resulting in a significant reduction of the MMV problem size. Given the sparse vector of row-norms, the jointly sparse signal can be computed from the MMVs in closed form. For the special case of uniform linear sampling, we present an extension of the compact formulation for gridless parameter estimation by means of semidefinite programming. Furthermore, we derive in this case from our compact problem formulation the exact equivalence between the $\ell_{2,1}$ mixed-norm minimization and the atomic-norm minimization. Additionally, for the case of irregular sampling or a large number of samples, we present a low complexity, grid-based implementation based on the coordinate descent method

Multiple and single snapshot compressive beamforming

For a sound field observed on a sensor array, compressive sensing (CS) reconstructs the direction-of-arrival (DOA) of multiple sources using a sparsity constraint. The DOA estimation is posed as an underdetermined problem by expressing the acoustic pressure at each sensor as a phase-lagged superposition of source amplitudes at all hypothetical DOAs. Regularizing with an $\ell_1$-norm constraint renders the problem solvable with convex optimization, and promoting sparsity gives high-resolution DOA maps. Here, the sparse source distribution is derived using maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimates for both single and multiple snapshots. CS does not require inversion of the data covariance matrix and thus works well even for a single snapshot where it gives higher resolution than conventional beamforming. For multiple snapshots, CS outperforms conventional high-resolution methods, even with coherent arrivals and at low signal-to-noise ratio. The superior resolution of CS is demonstrated with vertical array data from the SWellEx96 experiment for coherent multi-paths.Comment: In press Journal of Acoustical Society of Americ