Lacking of adaptation to various array imperfections is an open problem for most high-precision direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation methods. Machine learning-based methods are data-driven, they do ...not rely on prior assumptions about array geometries, and are expected to adapt better to array imperfections when compared with model-based counterparts. This paper introduces a framework of the deep neural network to address the DOA estimation problem, so as to obtain good adaptation to array imperfections and enhanced generalization to unseen scenarios. The framework consists of a multitask autoencoder and a series of parallel multilayer classifiers. The autoencoder acts like a group of spatial filters, it decomposes the input into multiple components in different spatial subregions. These components thus have more concentrated distributions than the original input, which helps to reduce the burden of generalization for subsequent DOA estimation classifiers. The classifiers follow a one-versus-all classification guideline to determine if there are signal components near preseted directional grids, and the classification results are concatenated to reconstruct a spatial spectrum and estimate signal directions. Simulations are carried out to show that the proposed method performs satisfyingly in both generalization and imperfection adaptation.
In this paper, we propose a convolutional recurrent neural network for joint sound event localization and detection (SELD) of multiple overlapping sound events in three-dimensional (3-D) space. The ...proposed network takes a sequence of consecutive spectrogram time frames as input and maps it to two outputs in parallel. As the first output, the sound event detection (SED) is performed as a multi-label classification task on each time frame producing temporal activity for all the sound event classes. As the second output, localization is performed by estimating the 3-D Cartesian coordinates of the direction-of-arrival (DOA) for each sound event class using multi-output regression. The proposed method is able to associate multiple DOAs with respective sound event labels and further track this association with respect to time. The proposed method uses separately the phase and magnitude component of the spectrogram calculated on each audio channel as the feature, thereby avoiding any method- and array-specific feature extraction. The method is evaluated on five Ambisonic and two circular array format datasets with different overlapping sound events in anechoic, reverberant, and real-life scenarios. The proposed method is compared with two SED, three DOA estimation, and one SELD baselines. The results show that the proposed method is generic and applicable to any array structures, robust to unseen DOA values, reverberation, and low SNR scenarios. The proposed method achieved a consistently higher recall of the estimated number of DOAs across datasets in comparison to the best baseline. Additionally, this recall was observed to be significantly better than the best baseline method for a higher number of overlapping sound events.
In this letter, we address the problem of direction finding using coprime array, which is one of the most preferred sparse array configurations. Motivated by the fact that non-uniform element spacing ...hinders full utilization of the underlying information in the receive signals, we propose a direction-of-arrival (DoA) estimation algorithm based on low-rank reconstruction of the Toeplitz covariance matrix. The atomic-norm representation of the measurements from the interpolated virtual array is considered, and the equivalent dual-variable rank minimization problem is formulated and solved using a cyclic optimization approach. The recovered covariance matrix enables the application of conventional subspace-based spectral estimation algorithms, such as MUSIC, to achieve enhanced DoA estimation performance. The estimation performance of the proposed approach, in terms of the degrees-of-freedom and spatial resolution, is examined. We also show the superiority of the proposed method over the competitive approaches in the root-mean-square error sense.
This article addresses the problem of joint direction of departure (DOD) and direction of arrival (DOA) estimation with nested bistatic multiple input multiple output (MIMO) radar using tensor ...decomposition. We first employ the two-level nested transmit and receive arrays to develop the sum-difference coarray for constructing the Toeplitz and spatial smoothing matrices. We then generalize the three-way tensor model from DOD and DOA dimensions, and derive the optimized tensor by maximizing the number of detectable targets, where the existing COMFAC technique is exploited for angle estimation. We show that the proposed method can identify more targets and achieve better performance by enforcing the three-way structure information compared with the subspace-based algorithms. We also show that the conventional tensor model is just a special case. Finally, we derive the coarray Cramér-Rao Bound (CRB) for the nested MIMO radar, and also conduct a study for the conditions under which the CRB exists. Numerical simulations are provided to validate the theoretical analysis and demonstrate the performance improvement.
In this work, we consider direction-of-arrival (DoA) estimation in the presence of extreme noise using Deep Learning (DL). In particular, we introduce a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that ...predicts angular directions using the sample covariance matrix estimate. The network is trained from multi-channel data of the true array manifold matrix in the low signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) regime. By adopting an on-grid approach, we model the problem as a multi-label classification task and train the CNN to predict DoAs across all SNRs. The proposed architecture demonstrates enhanced robustness in the presence of noise, and resilience to a relatively small number of snapshots. Moreover, it is able to resolve angles within the grid resolution. Experimental results demonstrate significant performance gains in the low-SNR regime compared to state-of-the-art methods and without the requirement of any parameter tuning in both cases of correlated and uncorrelated sources. Finally, we relax the assumption that the number of sources is known a priori and present a training method, where the CNN learns to infer their number and predict the DoAs with high confidence. The increased robustness of the proposed solution is highly desirable in challenging scenarios that arise in several fields, ranging from wireless array sensors to acoustic microphones or sonars.
The polarized massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technique has been regarded as a promising solution to millimeter wave (mmWave) communication systems, because it experiences more ...degrees-of-freedom than the scalar configuration, and it represents a significant opportunity for secure communication. To deliver smart service to terminals, it is essential to provide base stations (BS) with the capability of terminal's direction-of-arrival (DOA) awareness. In this paper, a compressive sampling (CS) framework is proposed for two-dimensional (2D) DOA and polarization estimation in mmWave polarized massive MIMO systems. The proposed approach first reduces the data volume via a reduced-dimension matrix. Then it computes the signal subspace via the eigendecomposition of the compressed array measurement. Thereafter, the rotational invariance characteristic is utilized to form a normalized polarization steering vector. Finally, 2D-DOA and polarization are estimated by incorporating the Poynting vector and the least squares (LS) techniques. The proposed architecture is computationally much more economical than existing algorithms. Besides, it allows a mmWave BS to provide comparable estimation performance with arbitrary sensor geometry, which is more flexible than most of the existing architectures. Furthermore, it is robust to the sensor position error. Numerical simulations verify the advantages of the proposed framework.
We consider the channel estimation problem in point-to-point reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided millimeter-wave (mmWave) MIMO systems. By exploiting the low-rank nature of mmWave channels ...in the angular domains, we propose a non-iterative Two-stage RIS-aided Channel Estimation (TRICE) framework, where every stage is formulated as a multidimensional direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation problem. As a result, our TRICE framework is very general in the sense that any efficient multidimensional DOA estimation solution can be readily used in every stage to estimate the associated channel parameters. Numerical results show that the TRICE framework has a lower training overhead and a lower computational complexity, as compared to benchmark solutions.
Subspace-based methods suffer from the rank loss of the noise free data covariance matrix in the context of direction of arrival (DOA) estimation of coherent sources. The well-known spatial smoothing ...techniques are then widely employed to create a rank restored data covariance matrix. However, conventional spatial smoothing techniques, such as the spatial smoothing pre-processing (SSP), modified spatial smoothing pre-processing (MSSP), and improved spatial smoothing (ISS), do not make full use of the available information in the data covariance matrix. In this paper, an enhanced spatial smoothing (ESS) technique is proposed to exploit both the covariance matrices of individual subarrays and the cross-covariance matrices of different subarrays. Besides, the proposed method can work directly on the signal subspace (ESS-SS), since the signal subspace contains all the information of the DOAs of incoming signals. After de-correlation, the subspace method ESPRIT is adopted to estimate the DOAs. Compared with conventional approaches, the proposed method is more powerful to de-correlate the correlation between signals, and also more robust to the noise impact. The proposed method is tested on numerical data in coherent scenarios, and compared with conventional approaches. Simulation results show that the proposed method has an enhanced resolving capability and a lower signal-to-noise ratio threshold.
A receiver structure is proposed to jointly estimate the time-of-arrival (TOA) and azimuth and elevation angles of direction-of-arrival (DOA) from received cellular long-term evolution (LTE) signals. ...In the proposed receiver, a matrix pencil (MP) algorithm is used in the acquisition stage to obtain a coarse estimate of the TOA and DOA. Then, a tracking loop is proposed to refine the estimates and jointly track the TOA and DOA changes. The performance of the acquisition and tracking stages are evaluated in the presence of noise and multipath. Simulation results are provided to validate the analytical results. The Cramér-Rao lower bounds (CRLBs) of the TOA and DOA estimates are derived to compare the performance of the proposed acquisition and tracking approaches with the best-case performance. It is shown that the proposed approach has lower complexity compared to the MP algorithm. Finally, experimental results are provided with real LTE signals, showing a reduction of 93%, 57%, and 31% in the standard deviation of TOA, azimuth, and elevation angles' estimation errors, respectively, using the proposed receiver compared to the MP algorithm.
As is well known, nonuniform linear arrays have significant advantages in array aperture and degrees of freedom over uniform linear arrays. Using their difference coarrays, subspace-based approaches ...can be utilized to perform underdetermined and high-resolution direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation. However, the subspace-based approaches depend on the covariance matrix reconstruction in the coarray domain, which are not statistically efficient when the number of sources is more than one and less than the number of sensors. In this paper, to overcome this drawback, we devise an augmented covariance matrix reconstruction algorithm for DOA estimation in the coarray domain. The proposed algorithm recovers the complete augmented covariance matrix by solving a rank-minimization problem. But unlike the conventional schemes, it exploits the estimation error distribution of the incomplete augmented covariance matrix to derive the constraint condition of the rank-minimization problem. Based on the reconstructed augmented covariance matrix, we can enhance the DOA estimation performance for multiple source scenario at high signal-to-noise ratio. Although our algorithm is developed based on the non-consecutive coarray, it is also suitable for the consecutive coarray. Numerical results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm over several existing approaches.