Joint Angular-Frequency Distribution Estimation Via Spatial-Temporal Sparse Sampling and Low-Rank Matrix Recovery

•We propose a method to estimate joint angular-frequency distribution for incoherently distributed wideband sources via spatio-temporal sparse sampling and low-rank matrix recovery.•This method based on spatio-temporal sparse sampling increases dramatically the degrees of freedom of the system, and overcomes effectively the ambiguity between the angular and frequency parameters in one dimensional linear array.•This method based on the accelerated iterative singular value thresholding algorithm provides efficient computing for low-rank matrix recovery.•The effectiveness and superior performance are shown for the proposed method.