Abstract: The underwater acoustic target direction of arrival (DOA) estimation methods which using basic pursuit as reconstruct algorithm were slower in the process of computation. Considering the problem, a fast direction of arrival estimation method was proposed by analyzing the underwater target space sparsity, which utilizes the characteristics of compressed sensing framework of DOA. This method obtained the optimal solution through l₀ norm by reducing the parameters of the approximation gradually, then achieved the direction of arrival of underwater acoustic target. Simulation results compared the method performance with basic pursuit algorithm by different facets such as success rate, operation time, resolution, and showed that its success rate and resolution is roughly equal to the basic pursuit algorithm, but the computation time was reduced more.