  Direction of arrival (DOA) estimation is a classical problem in signal
processing with many practical applications. Its research has recently been
advanced owing to the development of methods based on sparse signal
reconstruction. While these methods have shown advantages over conventional
ones, there are still difficulties in practical situations where true DOAs are
not on the discretized sampling grid. To deal with such an off-grid DOA
estimation problem, this paper studies an off-grid model that takes into
account effects of the off-grid DOAs and has a smaller modeling error. An
iterative algorithm is developed based on the off-grid model from a Bayesian
perspective while joint sparsity among different snapshots is exploited by
assuming a Laplace prior for signals at all snapshots. The new approach applies
to both single snapshot and multi-snapshot cases. Numerical simulations show
that the proposed algorithm has improved accuracy in terms of mean squared
estimation error. The algorithm can maintain high estimation accuracy even
under a very coarse sampling grid.
