A novel joint method for source number and DOA estimation for closely spaced sources

The source number and direction of arrival (DOA) estimation are two key issues in array signal processing, and the estimation performance will degrade severely for closely spaced sources with large power differences. Especially for the weak sources, the interference from the closely spaced strong sources will disable most traditional algorithms to estimate accurately. In this paper, a novel joint estimation method is proposed for source number and DOA estimation. Through obtaining the eigen spatial spectrum of each eigenvector and comparing the spectrum peak with the threshold, the proposed method can effectively improve the source number and DOA estimation performance, especially for weak sources. Finally, numerical experiments are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.