Direction of Arrival Estimation by Combining Robust Spatial Time-Frequency Distributions and Spatial Filtering

This paper presents a novel and robust algorithm to estimate the direction of arrival of sources by combining spatial time-frequency distributions and spatial filtering. The proposed algorithm first analyzes a given signal using robust spatial time-frequency distribution. Then, the strongest time-frequency points are selected and clustered to find out the direction of the strongest source. The signal corresponding to the strongest source is then removed through spatial filtering, and this process is iterated till the directions of all the sources are estimated. Numerical results indicate that the proposed method achieves better performance compared to other state-of-the-art methods for both complete signals and sparsely sampled signals. For example, in direction of arrival estimation, the proposed method achieves a mean square error of -37 dB which is 2 dB lower than the mean square error achieved by the next best method.