Experimental Validation of Wideband SBL Models for DOA Estimation

Sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) has been successful in direction of arrival (DOA) estimation due to its robustness and high resolution using a few snapshots. Most wideband SBL algorithms make the simplifying assumption that distinct sources have the same power spectrum across frequency bands. However, this assumption may not be true in practice (for example speech signals). We analyze three wideband signal models and compare variants of wideband SBL (called SBL1, SBL2, and SBL3) with different assumptions on source signal power spectrum. The localization performance of SBL algorithms is compared with wideband processing of conventional beamforming (CBF) and multiple signal classification (MUSIC). The experimental validation is presented using simulated data and experimental LOCATA data. This comparative study shows that SBL3 which simultaneously enforces sparsity and models frequency-dependent signal spectrum shows superior performance in most scenarios.