Adaptive correcting combiner for arrays of acoustic vector sensors with phase and gain mismatch errors

This paper introduces a method to coherently combine the signals collected by the directional and omnidirectional channels of an Acoustic Vector Sensor array when the supporting frame is introducing a phase and gain mismatch error. The proposed method adaptively estimates the distortion introduced by the supporting frame and corrects the measurements at the sensors before their coherent combination. The paper evaluates the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound for Direction of Arrival estimation and compares the bound with simulated data and real data collected at sea. The proposed method is asymptotically efficient, reaching the lower bound for sufficiently large values of the signal to noise ratio.