Direction finding after blind identification of sources steering vectors: The blind-maxcor and blind-music methods

To find the direction of arrival (DOA) of P sources impinging on an array of N sensors, actual second and fourth order direction finding (DF) methods try to solve a P-dimensional problem from the statistics of the data. The purpose of this paper is to present a new approach of DF, based on a first step of blind identification of sources steering vectors, aiming, for some of these methods, at reducing the problem dimension before DF. Two new methods, the Blind-MAXCOR and the Blind-MUSIC methods, are proposed and their performance are compared to that of MUSIC method.