Improved Estimation of Direction-of-Arrival by Adaptive Selection of Algorithms in Angular Spread Environments

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation method that can reduce performance degradation due to angular spread. Some algorithms previously proposed for such estimation make assumptions about the distributions of amplitude and phase for incident waves because most DOA estimation algorithms are sensitive to angular spread. However, when the assumptions are inaccurate, these algorithms perform poorly as compared with algorithms without countermeasures against angular spread. In this paper, we propose a method for selecting an appropriate DOA estimation algorithm according to the channel vector of each source signal as estimated by independent component analysis. Computer simulations show that the proposed method can robustly estimate DOA in environments with angular spread.