An improved fast DOA algorithm without the number of the signals known prior

A fast and efficient algorithm is proposed to estimate the direction of arrival (DOA) of the signals impinging on an uniformly located linear array. Unlike the classical MUSIC method, it is not needed for the method proposed in this paper to have the number of the signal sources known as a prior knowledge. The proposed method only needs the forward recursions of multistage Wiener filter (MSWF) to obtain the signal subspace and noise subspace. Thereby it does not involve any estimation of the signal covariance matrix and its eigendecomposition. This means that the proposed method is computationally attractive. Numerical results are included to illustrate the performance of the proposed method.