Direction-of-Arrival Estimation via Sparse Bayesian Learning Exploiting Hierarchical Priors with Low Complexity

For direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation problems in a sparse domain, sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) is highly favored by researchers owing to its excellent estimation performance. However, traditional SBL-based methods always assign Gaussian priors to parameters to be solved, leading to moderate sparse signal recovery (SSR) effects. The reason is Gaussian priors play a similar role to l2 regularization in sparsity constraint. Therefore, numerous methods are developed by adopting hierarchical priors that are used to perform better than Gaussian priors. However, these methods are in straitened circumstances when multiple measurement vector (MMV) data are adopted. On this basis, a block-sparse SBL method (named BSBL) is developed to handle DOA estimation problems in MMV models. The novelty of BSBL is the combination of hierarchical priors and block-sparse model originating from MMV data. Therefore, on the one hand, BSBL transfers the MMV model to a block-sparse model by vectorization so that Bayesian learning is directly performed, regardless of the prior independent assumption of different measurement vectors and the inconvenience caused by the solution of matrix form. On the other hand, BSBL inherited the advantage of hierarchical priors for better SSR ability. Despite the benefit, BSBL still has the disadvantage of relatively large computation complexity caused by high dimensional matrix operations. In view of this, two operations are implemented for low complexity. One is reducing the matrix dimension of BSBL by approximation, generating a method named BSBL-APPR, and the other is embedding the generalized approximate message passing (GAMB) technique into BSBL so as to decompose matrix operations into vector or scale operations, named BSBL-GAMP. Moreover, BSBL is able to suppress temporal correlation and handle wideband sources easily. Extensive simulation results are presented to prove the superiority of BSBL over other state-of-the-art algorithms.