Direction of arrival estimation in the presence of noise with unknown, arbitrary covariance matrices

A novel method for estimating directions of arrival of plane waves impinging on arrays of sensors is proposed. The method is particularly well suited t the case in which the background noise field is nonisotropic, with arbitrary covariance matrix. The joint posterior probability density function of the signal parameters and the noise covariance matrix Σ is formed, and then the dependence on Σ is integrated out, after a suitable noninformative prior p(Σ) is defined. The resulting estimator structure is then modified to reduce the computational requirements substantially. Significantly improved performance over the MUSIC algorithm, particularly with regard to threshold, is observed