Source Enumeration in Array Processing Using a Two-Step Test

We investigate the problem of enumerating source signals impinging on an array of sensors given noisy, limited observations. The assumption of a large sample size is indispensable for most of the existing approaches so that they suffer significant performance degradation when only a small number of samples is available. Random matrix theory can capture the asymptotic distributions of the eigenvalues accurately and provide good approximations even for a finite sample size. In this paper, we take into account the relationship and distributions of the noise and signal eigenvalues based on random matrix theory and derive a simple two-step test. Numerical simulations demonstrate that it is capable of correctly determining the number of sources in the case of small sample sizes.