Space-time Matrix Method for Mixed Near-Field and Far-Field Sources Localization

Mixed near-field and far-field sources localization problem has received significant attention recently in some practical applications, such as speaker localization using microphone arrays and guidance systems, etc. This paper presents a novel space-time matrix method to localize mixed near field and far-field sources. Using the proposed method, both the direction-of-arrival (DOA) and range of a source can be estimated by the same eigen-pair of a defined space-time matrix. Therefore, the pairing of the estimated angles and ranges is automatically determined. Compared with the previous work, the presented method offers a number of advantages over other recently proposed algorithms. For example, it can avoid not only parameters matching problem but also aperture loss problem. It has lower computational complexity since the proposed method does not require the high-order statistics or any parameter search. Simulation results show the performance of the proposed algorithm.