A high-efficient algorithm for DOA estimation

This paper presents a fourth-order cumulants based spectral estimation algorithm for direction-of-arrivals (DOA) estimation. The poor runtime performance of high-order cumulants-based algorithms restricts their application scenarios. If the number of antenna sensors is more than 8, such algorithms are rather computationally expensive. Aiming at this issue, a fast fourth-order cumulants-based spectral estimation algorithm (FFMUSIC) for DOA estimation is presented in this paper. Performance comparison of the proposed algorithm with the multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm and the conventional fourth-order cumulants based MUSIC (CFMUSIC) is demonstrated via two simulations. Experimental results, presented herein, show that the proposed algorithm has comparable statistical performance to and substantially lower computation time than the CFMUSIC, over 78% computation time is saved.