A Generalized Capon Estimator for Localization of Multiple Spread Sources

In this correspondence, we develop a generalized Capon spatial spectrum estimator for localization of multiple incoherently distributed (spread) sources in sensor arrays. The proposed generalized Capon technique estimates the source central angles and angular spreads by means of a two-dimensional (2-D) parameter search. Simulation results show that the proposed method has a substantially improved performance compared with several popular spread source localization methods.