Source detection and DOA estimation from two observations of a finite line aperture

The author deals with the joint problem of source detection and direction of arrival (DOA) estimation from the observation of a line aperture of finite length at two distinct times. The emphasis is on the practical case of small KL product, where K is the bandwidth of the spatial signal and L is the aperture length. The optimum (log-likelihood) processor for detection and DOA estimation is derived. A suboptimum processor with reduced computational complexity is also obtained based on a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) approximation. Computer simulations indicate that significant improvements in performance are possible with these processors when compared with more conventional correlation-based processing techniques.<>