Gaussian Cramer-Rao bound for direction estimation of noncircular signals in unknown noise fields

This paper focuses on the stochastic Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) on direction of arrival (DOA) estimation accuracy for noncircular Gaussian sources in the general case of an arbitrary unknown Gaussian noise field parameterized by a vector of unknowns. Explicit closed-form expressions of the stochastic CRB for DOA parameters alone are obtained directly from the Slepian-Bangs formula for general noncircular complex Gaussian distributions. As a special case, the CRB under the nonuniform white noise assumption is derived. Our expressions can be viewed as extensions of the well-known results by Stoica and Nehorai, Ottersten et al, Weiss and Friedlander, Pesavento and Gershman, and Gershman et aL Some properties of these CRBs are proved and finally, these bounds are numerically compared with the conventional CRBs under the circular complex Gaussian distribution for different unknown noise field models.