Direction-of-arrival method based on randomize-then-optimize approach

The direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation problem can be solved by the methods based on sparse Bayesian learning (SBL). To assure the accuracy, SBL needs massive amounts of snapshots which may lead to a huge computational workload. In order to reduce the snapshot number and computational complexity, a randomize-then-optimize (RTO) algorithm based DOA estimation method is proposed. The “learning” process for updating hyperparameters in SBL can be avoided by using the optimization and Metropolis-Hastings process in the RTO algorithm. To apply the RTO algorithm for a Laplace prior, a prior transformation technique is induced. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, several simulations are proceeded, which verifies that the proposed method has better accuracy with 1 snapshot and shorter processing time than conventional compressive sensing (CS) based DOA methods.