Direction-Of-Arrival Estimation: Approaches and Recent Advances

Direction-of-arrival estimation is a fundamental problem in various fields, including radar and communications. Although the Fourier Transform that yields the traditional beamformer is computationally very efficient, its performance is seen as modest as it does not achieve high resolution. Therefore, classical high-resolution methods generally employ subspace projection techniques to achieve a resolution that is higher than a bin width. Recently, however, significant advances in Fourier-based DOA estimation have yielded algorithms rival the subspace-based methods as they are able to achieve a high resolution at a fraction of the computational cost. This topic will cover classical DOA estimation techniques as well as the recent advances in fast estimators.