Direction finding in correlated noise fields based on joint block-diagonalization of spatio-temporal correlation matrices

Direction of arrival (DOA) estimation techniques require knowledge of the sensor-to-sensor correlation of the noise, which constitutes a significant drawback. In the case of temporally correlated signals, it is possible to estimate the signal parameters without any assumptions made on the spatial covariance matrix of the noise. A new method for the estimation of the signal subspace and noise subspace is introduced. The proposed approach is based on a joint block-diagonalization (JBD) of a combined set of spatio-temporal correlation matrices. Once the signal and the noise subspaces are estimated, any subspace based approach can be applied for DOA estimation. A performance comparison of the proposed approach with an existing technique is provided.