An Overview of Direction-of-Arrival Estimation Methods Using Adaptive Directional Time-Frequency Distributions

Direction of arrival (DOA) is one of the essential topics in array signal processing that has many applications in communications, smart antennas, seismology, acoustics, radars, and many more. As the applications of DOA estimation are broadened, the challenges in implementing a DOA algorithm arise. Different environments require different modifications to the existing methods. This paper reviews the DOA algorithms in the literature. It evaluates and compares the performance of the three well known algorithms, including MUSIC, ESPRIT, and Eigenvalue Decomposition (EVD), with and without using adaptive directional time-frequency distributions (ADTFD) at the preprocessing stage. We simulated a case with four sources and three receivers. The sources were well separated. Signals were received at each sensor with an SNR value of -5 dB, 0 dB, 5 dB, and 10 dB. The angles of the sources were 15, 30, 45, and 60 degrees. The simulation results show that the ADTFD algorithm significantly improved the performance of MUSIC, while it did not provide similar results for the ESPRIT and EVD methods. As expected, the computation time of the algorithms was increased by implementing the ADTFD algorithm as a preprocessing step.