Gridless DOA Estimation With Multiple Frequencies
Yifan Wu, Michael B. Wakin, Peter Gerstoft
Abstract
Direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation is widely applied in acoustic source localization. A multi-frequency model is suitable for characterizing the broadband structure in acoustic signals. In this paper, the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">continuous</i> (gridless) DOA estimation problem with multiple frequencies is considered. This problem is formulated as an atomic norm minimization (ANM) problem. The ANM problem is equivalent to a semi-definite program (SDP) which can be solved by an off-the-shelf SDP solver. The dual certificate condition is provided to certify the optimality of the SDP solution so that the sources can be localized by finding the roots of a polynomial. We also construct the dual polynomial to satisfy the dual certificate condition and show that such a construction exists when the source amplitude has a uniform magnitude. In multi-frequency ANM, spatial aliasing of DOAs at higher frequencies can cause challenges. We discuss this issue extensively and propose a robust solution to combat aliasing. Numerical results support our theoretical findings and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.