Detection and compensation of sensor malfunction in time delay based direction of arrival estimation

There is an increasing need for robust localization of signal sources of various types. With recent developments in sensory instrumentation, some of these needs can be answered. These new developments have also introduced new requirements. Sensor arrays and networks operate for long periods of time, perhaps unattended, and hardware malfunctions may occur between scheduled maintenance. Sensor systems should be able to detect and compensate for hardware failures. This paper presents a new method to detect and compensate for a failure of one sensor in an array performing time delay based direction of arrival (DOA) estimation. The method utilizes confidence factors based on the planar wave assumption. The proposed method is combined with time delay based DOA estimators and tested with simulations. Results indicate that the given method can be used to detect the failed sensor and improve DOA estimation performance when a failure has occurred.