  Parameter estimation from multiple measurement vectors (MMVs) is a
fundamental problem in many signal processing applications, e.g., spectral
analysis and direction-of- arrival estimation. Recently, this problem has been
address using prior information in form of a jointly sparse signal structure. A
prominent approach for exploiting joint sparsity considers mixed-norm
minimization in which, however, the problem size grows with the number of
measurements and the desired resolution, respectively. In this work we derive
an equivalent, compact reformulation of the $\ell_{2,1}$ mixed-norm
minimization problem which provides new insights on the relation between
different existing approaches for jointly sparse signal reconstruction. The
reformulation builds upon a compact parameterization, which models the
row-norms of the sparse signal representation as parameters of interest,
resulting in a significant reduction of the MMV problem size. Given the sparse
vector of row-norms, the jointly sparse signal can be computed from the MMVs in
closed form. For the special case of uniform linear sampling, we present an
extension of the compact formulation for gridless parameter estimation by means
of semidefinite programming. Furthermore, we derive in this case from our
compact problem formulation the exact equivalence between the $\ell_{2,1}$
mixed-norm minimization and the atomic-norm minimization. Additionally, for the
case of irregular sampling or a large number of samples, we present a low
complexity, grid-based implementation based on the coordinate descent method.
