High resolution direction-of-arrival estimation based on beam-spectra envelope

By exploiting the beam-spectra envelop information of the spatial spectrum which is generated by the conventional beamforming (CBF) method, a high resolution direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation method named DOA-BE is proposed. This method is decomposed into two different parts. A threshold of 3-dB width of CBF spectrum is obtained by using Neyman-Pearson criterion to determine the number of narrow-band sources. On the other hand, the DOA estimates are calculated by using multiple beam-spectra envelope information. The simulation and experimental results show that the DOA-BE method possesses higher resolution probability and smaller root mean squared error than Capon´s and MUSIC methods. Furthermore, the experimental results have proved that DOA-BE method has better performance than maximum likelihood (ML) method in some aspects, and that it will be perfectly used in the real time processing system.