Nonparametric statistics for DOA estimation in the presence of multipath

This paper is concerned with array signal processing in nonGaussian noise and in the presence of multipath. Robust and fully nonparametric high resolution algorithms for direction of arrival (DOA) estimation are presented. The algorithms are based on multivariate spatial sign and rank concepts. Spatial smoothing of the multivariate rank and sign based covariance matrices is employed as a preprocessing step in order to deal with coherent sources. The performance of the algorithms is studied using simulations. The results show that almost optimal performance is obtained in wide variety of different noise conditions.