A novel direction finding algorithm for distributed sources under impulsive noise environments

Abstract

We extend the bearing estimation algorithm for distributed sources to the impulsive noise scenario that can be modeled as an alpha-stable distributed process. Since the distributed source parameter estimator (DSPE) method is optimized based on the Gaussian model, its performance is severely degraded in the presence of impulsive noise. In this paper, a derivative of the error function-based operator (DEOP) is derived, and a novel direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation algorithm, namely, DEOP-DSPE, is proposed for distributed sources to suppress the impulsive noise. Meanwhile, to make more effective use of the sensors in the array, we also propose the conjugate co-prime array, which can reduce the number of physical sensors without decreasing the number of estimated target sources. Simulation results demonstrate that the DEOP-DSPE algorithm outperforms the existing direction finding methods for distributed sources in the presence of impulsive noise and illustrate the effectiveness of the conjugate co-prime array.