Wideband Direction of Arrival Estimation with Sparse Linear Arrays

Abstract

This paper concerns wideband direction of arrival (DoA) estimation with sparse linear arrays (SLAs). We rely on the assumption that the power spectrum of the wideband sources is the same up to a scaling factor, which could in theory allow us to resolve not only more sources than the number of antennas but also more sources than the number of degrees of freedom (DoF) of the difference co-array of the SLA. We resort to the Jacobi-Anger approximation to transform the coarray response matrices of all frequency bins into a single virtual uniform linear array (ULA) response matrix. Based on the obtained model, two super-resolution DoA estimation approaches based on atomic norm minimization (ANM) are proposed, one with and one without prior knowledge of the power spectrum. Simulation results show that our proposed methods outperform the state of the art and are indeed capable of resolving more sources than the number of DoF of the difference co-array.