MUSIC-Based Direction Finding through Simple Signal Subspace Estimation

The MUSIC (MUltiple SIgnal Classification) method estimates the directions of arrival (DOAs) of the signals impinging on a sensor array based on the fact that the noise subspace is orthogonal to the signal subspace. In the conventional MUSIC, an estimate of the basis for the noise subspace is obtained by eigendecomposing the sample matrix, which is computationally expensive. In this paper, we present a simple DOA estimation method which finds an estimate of the signal subspace basis directly from the columns of the sample matrix from which the noise power components are removed. DOA estimates are obtained by searching for minimum points of a cost function which is defined using the estimated signal subspace basis. The minimum points are efficiently found through the Brent method which employs parabolic interpolation. Simulation shows that the simple estimation method virtually has the same performance as the complex conventional method based on the eigendecomposition.