Signal enhancement of the spatial smoothing algorithm

A spatial smoothing algorithm to decorrelate highly correlated sources for direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation in narrowband problems is developed. The rate of decorrelation of the coherent sources is very low and sensitive to the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for sources with close DOAs. A method to enhance the signal (to remove the effects of the sensor noise) and to make the spatial smoothing robust with respect to SNR is proposed. This approach will significantly improve the resolution of the algorithm. Statistical characteristics of the improved spatial smoothing are compared with that of the standard spatial smoothing. >