An Efficient Self-Calibrating Direction-of-Arrival Estimator

In this paper, we discuss new self-calibrating techniques for direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation using an array of sensors, based on estimation-theoretic methods. We consider two cases; one where the background noise is known to be white; the other where the background noise is coloured with unknown covariance. Modern high-resolution array processing algorithms have long suffered from the sensitivity of the bearing estimates to sensor gain and phase calibration errors. This paper presents methods of jointly estimating both the incident DOA’s and calibration parameters, under the assumption that the radiation incident onto the array is in the form of a discrete number of plane waves. Simulation results are given which show that the performance of the proposed methods are significantly improved over conventional algorithms which do not take calibration errors into consideration.