Fast detection and DOA estimation of the unknown wideband signal sources

Abstract

SummaryThe direction of arrival (DOA) estimation analysis requires prior knowledge of frequency‐related information of the incident wideband signals, eg, center frequency and bandwidth, which are not available in many cases. This research is based on applications where DOA estimation of the wideband signal source is unknown, eg, in astronomy and unauthorized transmissions. Therefore, this paper has two major contributions. The first contribution is to identify the frequency spectrum of the wideband signals transmitted from an unknown source. The method use edge detection prestage to identify the frequency spectrum of the received signal. The second contribution is to estimate the DOA of the wideband signal at higher accuracy while keeping a minimum computational cost. The estimation of the DOAs was analyzed by measuring the orthogonal relationship between the signal and the noise subspaces of multiple frequency components of the sources. The introduced method utilizes subband as a reference frequency based on the extracted frequency‐related information rather than examining the complete incoming signal spectrum and exploits the spatial information of a few subbands. The introduced algorithm is implemented based on the well‐known method, test of orthogonality of projected subspaces (TOPS). Tests are conducted on a range of wideband signals with extreme values of signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR). Considerable performance improvement is obtained.