Direction-of-arrival estimation using acoustic vector sensors in the presence of noise

A vector-sensor consisting of a monopole sensor collocated with orthogonally oriented dipole sensors can be used for direction-of arrival (DOA) estimation. A method is proposed to estimate the DOA based on the direction of maximum power. Algorithms mentioned in earlier works are shown to be special cases of the proposed method. An iterative algorithm based on the principal of gradient ascent is presented for the solution of the maximum power problem. The proposed maximum-power method is shown to approach the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) with a suitable choice of parameter.