Direction finding in the presence of colored noise by candidate identification

A method is developed for identifying correct angles of arrivals from a set of candidate angles that contains spurious angles and the true ones, under the assumption that the colored noise is an autoregressive process and that a uniform linear array of sensors is used. The procedure is based on a relation derived for the higher-order reflection coefficients corresponding to the autocorrelation sequence of the signal plus noise. It is shown that the higher-order reflection coefficients of a set of plane waves impinging on a uniform linear array of sensors, in the presence of an unknown spatially autoregressive colored noise process, are equal to an order independent linear combination of the values of the Fourier transform of the corresponding optimal linear least squares normalized prediction error filter at the electric phase angles of the plane waves. The magnitudes of the coefficients are then used to decide whether a given candidate direction of arrival corresponds to an actual plane wave or not. The estimation of candidate angles is also briefly discussed. >