Compressive MUSIC: Revisiting the Link Between Compressive Sensing and Array Signal Processing

The multiple measurement vector (MMV) problem addresses the identification of unknown input vectors that share common sparse support. Even though MMV problems have been traditionally addressed within the context of sensor array signal processing, the recent trend is to apply compressive sensing (CS) due to its capability to estimate sparse support even with an insufficient number of snapshots, in which case classical array signal processing fails. However, CS guarantees the accurate recovery in a probabilistic manner, which often shows inferior performance in the regime where the traditional array signal processing approaches succeed. The apparent dichotomy between the probabilistic CS and deterministic sensor array signal processing has not been fully understood. The main contribution of the present article is a unified approach that revisits the link between CS and array signal processing first unveiled in the mid 1990s by Feng and Bresler. The new algorithm, which we call compressive MUSIC, identifies the parts of support using CS, after which the remaining supports are estimated using a novel generalized MUSIC criterion. Using a large system MMV model, we show that our compressive MUSIC requires a smaller number of sensor elements for accurate support recovery than the existing CS methods and that it can approach the optimal l(0)-bound with finite number of snapshots even in cases where the signals are linearly dependent.