Two Dimensional DOA Estimation by Ant Colony Optimization

The Multiple Signal Classification (MUSIC) method is a typical method for high-resolution Direction Of Arrival(DOA) estimation. Usually it performs spectrum search in certain grid space, which inevitably leads to high computational cost in the muti-dimensional case, for example the search for azimuth and elevation angle at the same time. To overcome this problem, in this paper, we introduced Ant Colony Optimization(ACO) to work with it. A new kind of ACO for continuous domain featured by Gauss kernel function is used to sample the MUSIC spectrum, which is regarded as the fitness function in the process. The resulted estimator is called Ant Colony Optimization based MUSIC (ACO-MUSIC). Simulations show that ACO-MUSIC not only reduces the computational complexity greatly but also maintains the excellent performance of the original MUSIC estimator.