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

Low-Complexity Direction-of-Arrival Estimation Based on Wideband Co-Prime Arrays

A class of low-complexity compressive sensing-based direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation methods for wideband co-prime arrays is proposed. It is based on a recently proposed narrowband estimation method, where a virtual array model is generated by directly vectorizing the covariance matrix and then using a sparse signal recovery method to obtain the estimation result. As there are a large number of redundant entries in both the auto-correlation and cross-correlation matrices of the two sub-arrays, they can be combined together to form a model with a significantly reduced dimension, thereby leading to a solution with much lower computational complexity without sacrificing performance. A further reduction in complexity is achieved by removing noise power estimation from the formulation. Then, the two proposed low-complexity methods are extended to the wideband realm utilizing a group sparsity based signal reconstruction method. A particular advantage of group sparsity is that it allows a much larger unit inter-element spacing than the standard co-prime array and therefore leads to further improved performance

Underdetermined DOA Estimation Under the Compressive Sensing Framework: A Review

Direction of arrival (DOA) estimation from the perspective of sparse signal representation has attracted tremendous attention in past years, where the underlying spatial sparsity reconstruction problem is linked to the compressive sensing (CS) framework. Although this is an area with ongoing intensive research and new methods and results are reported regularly, it is time to have a review about the basic approaches and methods for CS-based DOA estimation, in particular for the underdetermined case. We start from the basic time-domain CSbased formulation for narrowband arrays and then move to the case for recently developed methods for sparse arrays based on the co-array concept. After introducing two specifically designed structures (the two-level nested array and the co-prime array) for optimizing the virtual sensors corresponding to the difference coarray, this CS-based DOA estimation approach is extended to the wideband case by employing the group sparsity concept, where a much larger physical aperture can be achieved by allowing a larger unit inter-element spacing and therefore leading to further improved performance. Finally, a specifically designed ULA structure with associated CS-based underdetermined DOA estimation is presented to exploit the difference co-array concept in the spatio-spectral domain, leading to a significant increase in DOFs. Representative simulation results for typical narrowband and wideband scenarios are provided to demonstrate their performance

Discrete and Continuous Sparse Recovery Methods and Their Applications

Low dimensional signal processing has drawn an increasingly broad amount of attention in the past decade, because prior information about a low-dimensional space can be exploited to aid in the recovery of the signal of interest. Among all the different forms of low di- mensionality, in this dissertation we focus on the synthesis and analysis models of sparse recovery. This dissertation comprises two major topics. For the first topic, we discuss the synthesis model of sparse recovery and consider the dictionary mismatches in the model. We further introduce a continuous sparse recovery to eliminate the existing off-grid mismatches for DOA estimation. In the second topic, we focus on the analysis model, with an emphasis on efficient algorithms and performance analysis. In considering the sparse recovery method with structured dictionary mismatches for the synthesis model, we exploit the joint sparsity between the mismatch parameters and original sparse signal. We demonstrate that by exploiting this information, we can obtain a robust reconstruction under mild conditions on the sensing matrix. This model is very useful for radar and passive array applications. We propose several efficient algorithms to solve the joint sparse recovery problem. Using numerical examples, we demonstrate that our proposed algorithms outperform several methods in the literature. We further extend the mismatch model to a continuous sparse model, using the mathematical theory of super resolution. Statistical analysis shows the robustness of the proposed algorithm. A number-detection algorithm is also proposed for the co-prime arrays. By using numerical examples, we show that continuous sparse recovery further improves the DOA estimation accuracy, over both the joint sparse method and also MUSIC with spatial smoothing. In the second topic, we visit the corresponding analysis model of sparse recovery. Instead of assuming a sparse decomposition of the original signal, the analysis model focuses on the existence of a linear transformation which can make the original signal sparse. In this work we use a monotone version of the fast iterative shrinkage- thresholding algorithm (MFISTA) to yield efficient algorithms to solve the sparse recovery. We examine two widely used relaxation techniques, namely smoothing and decomposition, to relax the optimization. We show that although these two techniques are equivalent in their objective functions, the smoothing technique converges faster than the decomposition technique. We also compute the performance guarantee for the analysis model when a LASSO type of reconstruction is performed. By using numerical examples, we are able to show that the proposed algorithm is more efficient than other state of the art algorithms

Low complexity DOA estimation for wideband off-grid sources based on re-focused compressive sensing with dynamic dictionary

Under the compressive sensing (CS) framework, a novel focusing based direction of arrival (DOA) estimation method is first proposed for wideband off-grid sources, and by avoiding the application of group sparsity (GS) across frequencies of interest, significant complexity reduction is achieved with its computational complexity close to that of solving a single frequency based direction finding problem. To further improve the performance by alleviating both the off-grid approximation errors and the focusing errors which are even worse for the off-grid case, a dynamic dictionary based re-focused off-grid DOA estimation method is developed with the number of extremely sparse grids involved in estimation refined to the number of detected sources, and thus the complexity is still very low due to the limited increased complexity introduced by iterations, while improved performance can be achieved compared with those fixed dictionary based off-grid methods