Fast parallel factor decomposition technique for coherently distributed source localization

Abstract

This paper links parallel factor (PARAFAC) analysis to the problem of nominal direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation for coherently distributed (CD) sources and proposes a fast PARAFACbased algorithm by establishing the trilinear PARAFAC model. Relying on the uniqueness of the low-rank three-way array decomposition and the trilinear alternating least squares regression, the proposed algorithm achieves nominal DOA estimation and outperforms the conventional estimation of signal parameter via rotational technique CD (ESPRIT-CD) and propagator method CD (PM-CD) methods in terms of estimation accuracy. Furthermore, by means of the initialization via the propagator method, this paper accelerates the convergence procedure of the proposed algorithm with no estimation performance degradation. In addition, the proposed algorithm can be directly applied to the multiple-source scenario, where sources have different angular distribution shapes. Numerical simulation results corroborate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed fast PARAFAC-based algorithm.