Wideband array self-calibration and DOA estimation under large position errors

Abstract

For wideband array signals, existing self-calibration methods use a first order approximation to simplify the estimation procedure under the assumption of small sensor position errors. However, the performance will degrade severely as the position errors increase. In this paper, a novel self-calibration method based on the time-frequency distributions (TFDs) is proposed to relieve the small errors constraint. We firstly develop an approach for wideband signals to select the TFDs of each source. Then the TFDs are utilized to obtain the propagation delays, which have a simple linear relationship with the sensor positions. The direction of arrival (DOA) and positions are finally estimated by a two-step iteration without any approximation. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve accurate DOA and position estimation over a broad range of position errors with lower computational complexity, and outperforms existing self-calibration algorithms.