Estimation of two-dimensional DOA under a distributed source model and some simulation results

Abstract

Most research on the estimation of direction of arrival (DOA) has been performed based on the assumption that the signal sources are point sources. In some real surroundings, signal source localization can more adequately be accomplished with distributed source models. When the signal sources are distributed over an area, we cannot directly use well-known DOA estimation methods, because these methods are established based on the point source assumption. In this paper, we propose a 3-dimensional distributed signal source model, in which a source is represented by two parameters, the center angle and degree of dispersion. Then, we address the estimation of the elevation and azimuth angles of distributed sources based on the parametric distributed source modeling in the 3-dimensional space.