Sparsity and super-resolution in sound source localization with sensor arrays

Sound source localization with sensor arrays involves the estimation of the direction-of-arrival (DOA) from a limited number of observations. Compressive sensing (CS) is a method for solving such undetermined problems which achieves simultaneously sparsity, thus super-resolution, and computational speed. We formulate the DOA estimation as a sparse signal reconstruction problem and show that methods which exploit sparsity have superior performance compared to traditional methods for DOA estimation. To demonstrate the high-resolution capabilities and the robustness of CS and other sparsity promoting optimization techniques in DOA estimation, the methods are applied to experimental data from underwater acoustic measurements in the challenging scenario of source tracking from single snapshot data.