A variational Bayesian strategy for solving the DOA estimation problem in sparse array

This paper reformulates the problem of direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation for sparse array from a variational Bayesian perspective. In this context, we propose a hierarchical prior for the signal coefficients that amounts marginally to a sparsity-inducing penalty in maximum a posterior (MAP) estimation. Further, the specific hierarchy gives rise to a variational inference technique which operates in latent variable space iteratively. Our hierarchical formulation of the prior allow users to model the sparsity of the unknown signal with a high degree, and the corresponding Bayesian algorithm leads to sparse estimators reflecting posterior information beyond the mode. We provide experimental results with synthetic signals and compare with state-of-the-art DOA estimation algorithm, in order to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach.