Direction-of-Arrival Estimation using Location Unaware Linear Array

This paper presents a subarray based minimum variance distortionless response beamformer for a location unaware linear array. We show that asymptotically, it is possible to estimate the direction of arrival (DoA) using a linear array, without the knowledge of exact locations of the sensors. We then propose a subarray based algorithm, to estimate DoA using minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) beamformer. We quantify the bias in the DoA estimation, and provide an empirical method to address this issue. We then compare and show that the proposed method outperforms robust MVDR, nested-array MVDR and reduced-dimension MVDR, in terms of improved root-mean-squared error (RMSE).