ROBUST DECENTRALIZED DIRECTION-OF-ARRIVAL ESTIMATION IN CONTAMINATED NOISE

A new scheme for direction-of-arrival estimation is presented. In particular, we propose a procedure which provides estimates that are robust against outliers and distributional uncertainties. It also employs decentralized processing in which each subarray site provides a robust estimate of the number of sources accompanied by its corresponding reliability statistics such that only the reliable estimates of the number of sources are combined at the fusion center. A robust combination technique is used to combine the corresponding DOA estimates from the subarray sites. Simulation results show that the new scheme performs consistently when the outlier noise is present whereas the performance of the corresponding nonrobust method deteriorates quickly even with a slight change of the noise environment. This is especially significant at a low signal-to-noise ratio. © 1990 IEEE