DOA Estimation for a Mixture of Uncorrelated and Coherent Sources Based on Hierarchical Sparse Bayesian Inference with a Gauss-Exp-Chi2 Prior

Direction of arrival (DOA) estimation algorithms based on sparse Bayesian inference (SBI) can effectively estimate coherent sources without recurring to extra decorrelation techniques, and their estimation performance is highly dependent on the selection of sparse prior. Specifically, the specified sparse prior is expected to concentrate its mass on the zero and distribute with heavy tails; otherwise, these algorithms may suffer from performance degradation. In this paper, we introduce a new sparse-encouraging prior, referred to as “Gauss-Exp-Chi2” prior, and develop an efficient DOA estimation algorithm for a mixture of uncorrelated and coherent sources under a hierarchical SBI framework. The Gauss-Exp-Chi2 prior distribution exhibits a sharp peak at the origin and heavy tails, and this property makes it an appropriate prior to encourage sparse solutions. A three-layer hierarchical sparse Bayesian model is established. Then, by exploiting variational Bayesian approximation, the model parameters are estimated by alternately updating until Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the true posterior and the variational approximation becomes zero. By constructing the source power spectra with the estimated model parameters, the number and locations of the highest peaks are extracted to obtain source number and DOA estimates. In addition, some implementation details for algorithm optimization are discussed and the Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) of DOA estimation is derived. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and favorable performance of the proposed algorithm as compared with the state-of-the-art sparse Bayesian algorithms.