Direction Of Arrival Estimation In The Presence Of Noise With Unknown, Arbitrary Covariance Matrices

A new method for estimating directions of arrival of plane waves onto arrays of sensors is proposed. The method is particularly well-suited to the case where the background noise field is non-isotropic, with arbitrary covariance matrix. The joint posterior probability density function of the signal parameters and the noise covariance matrix Σ is formed after a suitable non-informative prior p(Σ) is defined, and then the dependence on Σ is integrated out. The resulting estimator structure is then modified to substantially reduce the computational requirements. A geometric interpretation of the final objective function is given. Significantly improved performance over the MUSIC algorithm, particularly with regard to threshold, is observed.