Research Article
Direction-of-Arrival Estimation for Coherent Sources
via Sparse Bayesian Learning
Zhang-Meng Liu,
1,2
Zheng Liu,
2
Dao-Wang Feng,
2
and Zhi-Tao Huang
1,2
1
e State Key Laboratory of Complex Electromagnetic Environment Eects on Electronics and Information System (CEMEE),
Luoyang 471003, China
2
College of Electronic Science and Engineering, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China
Correspondence should be addressed to Zhang-Meng Liu; liuzhangmeng@nudt.edu.cn
Received 26 October 2013; Accepted 24 March 2014; Published 27 April 2014
AcademicEditor:MatteoPastorino
Copyright © 2014 Zhang-Meng Liu et al. is is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution
License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly
cited.
A spatial ltering-based relevance vector machine (RVM) is proposed in this paper to separate coherent sources and estimate their
directions-of-arrival (DOA), with the lter parameters and DOA estimates initialized and rened via sparse Bayesian learning. e
RVM is used to exploit the spatial sparsity of the incident signals and gain improved adaptability to much demanding scenarios,
such as low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), limited snapshots, and spatially adjacent sources, and the spatial lters are introduced to
enhance global convergence of the original RVM in the case of coherent sources. e proposed method adapts to arbitrary array
geometry, and simulation results show that it surpasses the existing methods in DOA estimation performance.
1. Introduction
e problem of direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation with
sensor arrays is common in various applications, such as
radar, sonar, and wireless communications [1–4], and the
requirement for nding the directions of coherent sources
also widely emerges due to the factors like multipath and
jamming. Most of the existing superresolution methods, for
example, the subspace-based ones [1], do not adapt well to
such a problem in their original form, and further research
has been carried out to improve their adaptability in the
coherent scenarios [2, 5–7]. e method in [2]aimsonly
at CDMA signals with known codes, and those in [5–7]
are general-purpose ones that apply to common narrow-
band signals. Pillai and Kwon proposed making up for the
decient rank in the array output covariance matrix via
spatial smoothing [5], whose performance may deteriorate
ifthesourcesarespatiallyadjacent.enMoghaddamjoo
introduced the idea of spatial ltering to better decorrelate
the signals [6]. Aer that, Delis and Papadopoulos promoted
the ltering idea further by combining it with the forward
and backward processing [7]. e spatial smoothing and
ltering techniques require shi invariance property in the
array; thus, they adapt to special array geometries such as
the uniform linear arrays (ULA) only [5–7]. Moreover, aer
spatial preprocessing, the above methods exploit ordinary
subspace-based techniques to realize DOA estimation; thus,
they all lack adaptability to demanding scenarios, such as low
signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), limited snapshots, and spatially
adjacent sources, as good performances of the techniques rely
heavily on high-precision covariance matrix and subspace
estimates.
e recently emerging technique of sparse reconstruc-
tion has attracted much attention from various areas, and
it also provides a new perspective for DOA estimation.
Existing sparsity-inducing DOA estimation methods include
FOCUSS [8], L1-SVD [9], JLZA-DOA [10], CMSR [11], RVM-
DOA [12–14],andsoforth.osemethodscombinethe
spatial sparsity of the incident signals when tting the array
output with an overcomplete model and show improved
adaptation to the above mentioned demanding scenarios [8–
14]. As they realize DOA estimation by reconstructing the
array output, instead of exploiting the covariance matrix,
some of them also perform well for correlated and coherent
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
International Journal of Antennas and Propagation
Volume 2014, Article ID 959386, 8 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/959386