Direction-of-arrival estimation using distributed arrays: A canonical coordinates perspective with limited array size and sample support

This work provides a canonical coordinates perspective for direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation using two distributed sensor arrays. A new method for estimating the DOA of multiple far-field narrow-band sources is proposed. Distinct from existing asymptotic results for canonical correlation analysis (CCA) in such an application, our special interest lies in the realistic limited array size and sample support evaluation. And our proposed objective function does not need asymptotic assumption on array size. Reformulating the task of DOA estimation as a maximization problem under the canonical coordinates framework, we reveal the fact that the bearing information of the sources is embedded in the filtering matrices for generating the canonical coefficients. By properly making use of these filtering matrices we are able to reconstruct the steering vectors of the arrays, thus obtain the DOA estimation of the sources using distributed arrays.