A novel joint estimator of direction-of-arrival and time-delay for multiple source localization

Source localization is one of the important topics in signal processing, in which a key problem is to jointly estimate direction-of-arrival (DOA) and time-delay for multiple sources. In this paper, a novel and efficient algorithm of joint DOA and time-delay estimation (named as ESPRIT-TDF algorithm) is proposed. Based on constructing two special types of covariance matrixes for two identical subarrays, both DOA and time-delay can be estimated simultaneously via rotational invariance technique and high-resolution time-delay frequency (TDF) technique. This algorithm is not only easy to be implemented with low computation but also suitable for multiple source localization where the non-minimum phase signal is frequently employed. Computer simulations and experiments in water tank are conducted to show the improved performance in precision and resolution by using the ESPRIT-TDF algorithm.