A higher-order cumulant based DOA estimation algorithm

Most of the existing direction-of-arrival estimation algorithms depend on decomposition of the covariance matrix of the system which in turn require modeling of the contaminating noise. In this paper, a higher-order cumulant based algorithm for estimating the direction-of-arrival of m narrowband far field sources impinging on an array with n uniformly spaced sensors is proposed. Due to the unique property of higher order cumulant, the proposed method is shown to be at least theoretically independent of the additive Gaussian noise. The algorithm first evaluates the 2r^th order cumulant from the output of the system. By making use of these output cumulante, we obtain a new vector in which its elements are the coefficients of an equation whose roots are the DOA of the sources. The validity of the algorithm is demonstrated by extensive computer simulations.