Robust decentralized direction-of-arrival estimation in contaminated noise

A novel scheme for direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation is presented. The procedure provides estimates that are robust against outliers and distributional uncertainties. It also employs decentralized processing in which each subarray site provides a robust estimate of the number of sources accompanied by its corresponding reliability statistics, so that only the reliable estimates of the number of sources are combined at the fusion center. A robust technique is used to combine the corresponding DOA estimates from the subarray sites. Simulation results show that the scheme performs consistently when the outlier noise is present, whereas the performance of the corresponding nonrobust method deteriorates quickly even with a slight change of the noise environment. This is especially significant at a low signal-to-noise ratio