An extended TOPS algorithm based on incoherent signal subspace method

In this paper, we present an improved algorithm for wideband direction finding of far-field sources impinging on an array with a known arbitrary geometry. This algorithm is based on the test of orthogonality of projected subspaces (TOPS), so that it can be considered as an extension of TOPS algorithm (ETOPS). Due to using more information from several reference frequencies, the performance of the proposed method outperforms that of TOPS with arbitrarily chosen reference frequency, and varies with the number of the reference frequencies used. Although ETOPS needs more computation loads, each TOPS spectrum can be calculated individually. So, it is possible to obtain them at the same time in practice, which makes the proposed algorithm parallelizable easily and further speeds up the processing in practical implementation. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of our method.