Generic FRI-Based DOA Estimation: A Model-Fitting Method

Direction of arrival (DOA) estimation is a classical topic in source localization. Notably, a reliable grid-free sparse representation algorithm, called FRI (finite rate of innovation) algorithm, was proposed to recover the finite number of Dirac pulses from a stream of 1D temporal samples, which also offers a efficient solution to the DOA estimation problem. Typically, FRI method assumes uniform sampling with single snapshot. However, the actual situation is richer and more diverse. Motivated by the requests of practical applications (e.g. array deployment, algorithm run-speed, etc.), a generic FRI method is proposed to tackle the more general case in practice, i.e. non-uniform sampling with multiple snapshots. Instead of annihilating the measured sensor data, a model-fitting method is used to robustly retrieve the sparse representation (i.e. DOAs and associated amplitudes) of the 1D samples. We demonstrate that our algorithm can handle challenging DOA tasks with high-resolution, which we validate in various conditions, such as multiple coherent sources, insufficient signal snapshots, low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), etc. Moreover, we show that the computational complexity of our algorithm mainly scales with the number of sources and varies very slowly with the number of samples and snapshots, which meets the needs of a wider range of practical applications.