On the Complementarity of Sparse L0 and CEL0 Regularized Loss Landscapes for DOA Estimation

Abstract

L0 sparse methods are not widespread in Direction-Of-Arrival (DOA) estimation yet, despite their potential superiority over classical methods in difficult scenarios. This comes from the difficulties encountered for global optimization on hill-climbing error surfaces. In this paper, we explore the loss landscapes of L0 and Continuous Exact L0 (CEL0) regularized problems in order to design a new optimization scheme. As expected, we observe that the recently introduced CEL0 penalty leads to an error surface with less local minima than the L0 one. This property explains the good behavior of the CEL0-regularized sparse DOA estimation problem for well-separated sources. Unfortunately, CEL0-regularized landscape enlarges L0-basins in the middle of close sources, and CEL0 methods are thus unable to resolve two close sources. Consequently, we propose to alternate between both error surfaces to increase the probability of reaching the global solution. Experiments show that the proposed approach offers better performance than existing ones, and particularly an enhanced resolution limit.