Direction-of-arrival estimation of wideband chirp signals using the Wigner distribution of symmetrical sensor array

Recently, time-frequency techniques have been successfully applied in narrowband direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation (see Amin, M.G., 1999; Belouchrani, A. and Amin, M.G., 1999; Zhang, Y. et al., 2001; 2000). A novel time-frequency approach to direction finding of wideband chirp signals is proposed. Our technique employs the Wigner-Ville distribution (WVD) of a symmetrical sensor array to get direction vectors of wideband chirp signals. By time-frequency selectivity, a new data model is constructed to estimate the DOA of each signal one by one. A subspace method is exploited to deduce the DOA from the new model. The computation cost of our method is low because no focussing or interpolation is needed. Simulation results illustrate the performance of our method.