Spatial time-frequency DOA estimation based on joint diagonalization using Jacobi rotation

Direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation consists of locating closely spaced sources impinging from different directions in the presence of considerable noise or interference. Recently, this problem has been solved using spatial time-frequency distribution (STFD) information that is available in the array signals. In this work, a new joint diagonalization approach based on Jacobi rotation, which can efficiently combine all of the relevant STFD points, is proposed to achieve superior DOA resolutions and suppressed sidelobes in the spatial spectrum. It is discovered that our proposed Jacobi technique leads to a non-orthogonal joint diagonalization structure and can avoid pre-whitening the signal component of the observation. In addition, we further adopt the minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) processor instead of the MUltiple SIgnal Classification (MUSIC) algorithm to avoid the estimation of the signal subspace and noise subspace in the time-frequency DOA domain. Finally, computer simulations of several frequently encountered types of challenging scenarios (such as low SNR and coherent arrivals) show that significant improvements are achieved by our proposed approach in comparison to the existing techniques.