Stochastic framework for evaluating the effect of displaced antenna elements on DOA estimation

We establish a statistical framework for investigating the influence of correlated random displacements of antenna elements in a uniform circular antenna array (UCA) on the distribution of direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimates. More specifically, we apply a stochastic collocation method formodeling the sparse UCA root-MUSIC-DOA estimates as polynomial expansions of the random displacements. Compared to Monte-Carlo simulations, this approach yields a speedup of about 40 for the case of a displacement of two antenna elements

Modelling and Estimation of Carrier Frequency and Phase Uncertainties in Large Aperture Arrays

This paper is concerned with the modelling and estimation of frequency and phase carrier uncertainties in an array system where its elements are distributed over a large area and consequently forming large aperture arrays with massive inter-element spacings. In this situation, it is practically impossible to have a common carrier (common local oscillator - LO) in order to form a fully coherent array system, as in the case of small aperture arrays where the array elements are in the vicinity of each other. Instead, each of the receiving array elements has its own independent carrier which will have slightly different frequencies and phases, even if the local oscillators are using similar hardware or even if each local oscillator is using a GPS reference clock for locking. These discrepancies will introduce frequency and phase uncertainties in the array which must be removed to achieve a coherent array system. In this paper, these uncertainties are mathematically modelled, their effect on the performance of an array system is examined and a simple method is proposed to estimate and eliminate these uncertainties. This work is supported by computer simulation studies and experimental results using a software defined radio (SDR) array testbed

Space Time MUSIC: Consistent Signal Subspace Estimation for Wide-band Sensor Arrays

Wide-band Direction of Arrival (DOA) estimation with sensor arrays is an essential task in sonar, radar, acoustics, biomedical and multimedia applications. Many state of the art wide-band DOA estimators coherently process frequency binned array outputs by approximate Maximum Likelihood, Weighted Subspace Fitting or focusing techniques. This paper shows that bin signals obtained by filter-bank approaches do not obey the finite rank narrow-band array model, because spectral leakage and the change of the array response with frequency within the bin create \emph{ghost sources} dependent on the particular realization of the source process. Therefore, existing DOA estimators based on binning cannot claim consistency even with the perfect knowledge of the array response. In this work, a more realistic array model with a finite length of the sensor impulse responses is assumed, which still has finite rank under a space-time formulation. It is shown that signal subspaces at arbitrary frequencies can be consistently recovered under mild conditions by applying MUSIC-type (ST-MUSIC) estimators to the dominant eigenvectors of the wide-band space-time sensor cross-correlation matrix. A novel Maximum Likelihood based ST-MUSIC subspace estimate is developed in order to recover consistency. The number of sources active at each frequency are estimated by Information Theoretic Criteria. The sample ST-MUSIC subspaces can be fed to any subspace fitting DOA estimator at single or multiple frequencies. Simulations confirm that the new technique clearly outperforms binning approaches at sufficiently high signal to noise ratio, when model mismatches exceed the noise floor.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures. Accepted in a revised form by the IEEE Trans. on Signal Processing on 12 February 1918. @IEEE201

Direction of Arrival Estimation for Radio Positioning: a Hardware Implementation Perspective

Nowadays multiple antenna wireless systems have gained considerable attention due to their capability to increase performance. Advances in theory have introduced several new schemes that rely on multiple antennas and aim to increase data rate, diversity gain, or to provide multiuser capabilities, beamforming and direction finding (DF) features. In this respect, it has been shown that a multiple antenna receiver can be potentially used to perform radio localization by using the direction of arrival (DoA) estimation technique. In this field, the literature is extensive and gathers the results of almost four decades of research activities. Among the most cited techniques that have been developed, we find the so called high-resolution algorithms, such as multiple signal classification (MUSIC), or estimation of signal parameters via rotational invariance (ESPRIT). Theoretical analysis as well as simulation results have demonstrated their excellent performance to the point that they are usually considered as reference for the comparison with other algorithms. However, such a performance is not necessarily obtained in a real system due to the presence of non idealities. These can be divided into two categories: the impairments due to the antenna array, and the impairments due to the multiple radio frequency (RF) and acquisition front-ends (FEs). The former are strongly influenced by the manufacturing accuracy and, depending on the required DoA resolution, have to be taken into account. Several works address these issues in the literature. The multiple FE non idealities, instead, are usually not considered in the DoA estimation literature, even if they can have a detrimental effect on the performance. This has motivated the research work in this thesis that addresses the problem of DoA estimation from a practical implementation perspective, emphasizing the impact of the hardware impairments on the final performance. This work is substantiated by measurements done on a state-of-the-art hardware platform that have pointed out the presence of non idealities such as DC offsets, phase noise (PN), carrier frequency offsets (CFOs), and phase offsets (POs) among receivers. Particularly, the hardware platform will be herein described and examined to understand what non idealities can affect the DoA estimation performance. This analysis will bring to identify which features a DF system should have to reach certain performance. Another important issue is the number of antenna elements. In fact, it is usually limited by practical considerations, such as size, costs, and also complexity. However, the most cited DoA estimation algorithms need a high number of antenna elements, and this does not yield them suitable to be implemented in a real system. Motivated by this consideration, the final part of this work will describe a novel DoA estimation algorithm that can be used when multipath propagation occurs. This algorithm does not need a high number of antenna elements to be implemented, and it shows good performance despite its low implementation/computational complexity

IMPACT OF MICROPHONE POSITIONAL ERRORS ON SPEECH INTELLIGIBILITY

The speech of a person speaking in a noisy environment can be enhanced through electronic beamforming using spatially distributed microphones. As this approach demands precise information about the microphone locations, its application is limited in places where microphones must be placed quickly or changed on a regular basis. Highly precise calibration or measurement process can be tedious and time consuming. In order to understand tolerable limits on the calibration process, the impact of microphone position error on the intelligibility is examined. Analytical expressions are derived by modeling the microphone position errors as a zero mean uniform distribution. Experiments and simulations were performed to show relationships between precision of the microphone location measurement and loss in intelligibility. A variety of microphone array configurations and distracting sources (other interfering speech and white noise) are considered. For speech near the threshold of intelligibility, the results show that microphone position errors with standard deviations less than 1.5cm can limit losses in intelligibility to within 10% of the maximum (perfect microphone placement) for all the microphone distributions examined. Of different array distributions experimented, the linear array tends to be more vulnerable whereas the non-uniform 3D array showed a robust performance to positional errors

A matrix-pencil approach to blind separation of colored nonstationary signals

For many signal sources such as speech with distinct, nonwhite power spectral densities, second-order statistics of the received signal mixture can be exploited for signal separation. Without knowledge on noise correlation matrix, we propose a simple and yet effective signal extraction method for signal source separation under unknown temporally white noise. This new and unbiased signal extractor is derived from the matrix pencil formed between output autocorrelation matrices at different delays. Based on the matrix pencil, an ESPRIT-type algorithm is derived to get an optimal solution in least square sense. Our method is well suited for systems with colored sensor noises and for nonstationary signals. © 2000 IEEE.published_or_final_versio