A new DOA estimation algorithm for ARMA sources applied to sperm-whale localization

Abstract

We present a new method for DOA estimation that relies on the assumption that the sources can be modelled as ARMA. A matrix formulation is introduced in the frequency domain so that the available information from the sources can be incorporated thus allowing the DOA estimation with a few sensors and achieve good estimates with acceptable computational demand. Due to the nature of the ARMA models we can formulate a so called extended array and give mathematical foundation of the new algorithm. A set of simulations is performed on real sources (sperm-whales) of interest for the scientific community of biologists. Our results show that our method performs well for a wide range of DOAs and compares favourably with other proposed methods in terms of accuracy and precision of the estimations.