Statistical performance comparison of high-resolution DOA estimation methods

A wide comparison of statistical performances among high-resolution methods of direction estimation(MODE) are presented in this paper. The development of MODE is reviewed briefly at first. In order to investigate their statistical performance clearly, more than 30 kinds of methods are studied and divided into 5 groups. Ten typical approaches are evaluated in resolution and precision respectively. Based on a united simulation model, their performance are compared by using Monte-Carlo statistical analysis. Furthermore, several criteria for the application of MODE are presented to judge their practicality. At last, the conclusion is to show that WSF possesses the excellent performance for theoretical study, and MUSIC, Mini-Norm, TLS-ESPRIT are considered to be the most promising methods in practice.