DOA Estimation of Acoustic Signals Using Stacked Products of Cross-Correlations and Coherence Factor

Direction of arrival (DOA) estimation of acoustic signals has been studied extensively by many researchers. Improving the performance of the DOA estimation methods is a hot topic in array signal processing. In this study, an application of the coherence factor, which is widely applied in medical ultrasound imaging, is extended to DOA estimation of wideband acoustic signals. The advantage of applying different coherence factors in tracking acoustic sources is illustrated by a cross correlation-based DOA estimation. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed method both simulated data and narrowband and wideband recorded signals are utilized. Simulation results reveal that combining the coherence factors with the cross-correlation DOA estimator lead to resolution improvement for both narrowband and wideband acoustic sources.