Propagator Method and Triangular Factorization for Source Bearing Estimation of Coherent sources

Several works in the area of angle of arrival (AOA) estimation show that the linear methods such as the propagator method have much lower computational complexity than methods such as MUSIC and Matrix Pencil which are based on eigenvalue decomposition (EVD) or singular value decomposition (SVD) techniques. In this paper, we first present a novel method for constructing a Toeplitz data matrix from a single snapshot whose rank is not affected if the sources are coherent or non-coherent. Next, we propose two methods which can rapidly estimate the AOAs of incident signals without requiring SVD or EVD even in the case of coherent signals and a single snapshot. These are: (1) Toeplitz orthogonal projection propagator method (TOP-PM) and (2) Toeplitz orthogonal projection rank revealing QR factorization (TOP-RRQR). The simulation results verify that the proposed methods provide better performance than the well known Matrix Pencil method with less computational complexity.