A novel correntropy based DOA estimation algorithm in impulsive noise environments

The Direction of Arrival (DOA) estimation under impulsive noise environments remains open in the field of array signal processing. Inspired by the advantage of correntropy which exhibits a 'robust statistics' property, this paper proposes a new operator, namely, the correntropy based correlation (CRCO), for independent and identically distributed (i.i.d) symmetric alpha-stable (SaS) random variables. We define the CRCO based matrix for the array sensor outputs and show that it can be applied with MUSIC to estimating DOAs in the presence of complex symmetric alpha-stable noise. The comprehensive Monte-Carlo simulation results demonstrate that CRCO-MUSIC outperforms the existing fractional lower order statistics (FLOS) based MUSIC algorithms especially in highly impulsive noise environments. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.