A Super-Resolution Direction of Arrival Estimation Algorithm for Coprime Array via Sparse Bayesian Learning Inference

Abstract

In this paper, we address the problem of direction of arrival (DOA) estimation with coprime array in the context of sparse signal reconstruction to fully exploit the enhanced degrees of freedom (DOF) offered by the difference coarray. The proposed method is based on the framework of sparse Bayesian learning and can jointly refine the unknown DOAs and the sparse signals in a gradual and interweaved manner. Specifically, the proposed approach is constructed by iteratively decreasing a surrogate function majorizing a given objective function, which results in accelerating the speed to converge to the global minimum. Furthermore, for facilitating a noise-free sparse representation, a customized linear transformation is judiciously incorporated in our sparsity-inducing DOA estimator to eliminate the unknown noise variance, and in the mean time, the sample covariance matrix perturbation can be normalized to an identity matrix as a by-product. Extensive simulation experiments under different conditions finally demonstrate the superiority of our suggested algorithm in terms of mean-squared DOA estimation error, DOF and resolution ability over state-of-the-art techniques.