  For a sound field observed on a sensor array, compressive sensing (CS)
reconstructs the direction-of-arrival (DOA) of multiple sources using a
sparsity constraint. The DOA estimation is posed as an underdetermined problem
by expressing the acoustic pressure at each sensor as a phase-lagged
superposition of source amplitudes at all hypothetical DOAs. Regularizing with
an $\ell_1$-norm constraint renders the problem solvable with convex
optimization, and promoting sparsity gives high-resolution DOA maps. Here, the
sparse source distribution is derived using maximum a posteriori (MAP)
estimates for both single and multiple snapshots. CS does not require inversion
of the data covariance matrix and thus works well even for a single snapshot
where it gives higher resolution than conventional beamforming. For multiple
snapshots, CS outperforms conventional high-resolution methods, even with
coherent arrivals and at low signal-to-noise ratio. The superior resolution of
CS is demonstrated with vertical array data from the SWellEx96 experiment for
coherent multi-paths.
