Direction-of-arrival estimation based on spatial-temporal statistics without knowing the source number

Direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation is a central problem in array processing and has a variety of applications. In this paper, a new algorithm for finding DOAs of multiple temporally correlated signals is devised. The proposed approach is based on the joint diagonalization structure of a set of spatio-temporal correlation matrices. Unlike the subspace-based DOA estimators, it is not necessary to estimate the noise or signal subspace explicitly. Moreover, the proposed method can provide the spatial spectrum and estimate the DOAs even when the number of sources is not known a priori. Interestingly, it is revealed that the well-known MUSIC method is a special case of our algorithm. Simulation results validate that the developed approach is superior to conventional DOA estimators in terms of resolution capability, estimation accuracy, and robustness against array model errors. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.