| Sensor arrays are used in many applications where their ability to localize signal sources is essential. For many applications, it is necessary to estimate the direction-of-arrival (DOA) of target sources. Although there are many DOA estimation methods available, most of them are valid only for narrowband signals where time delay can be approximated as a phase shift. This thesis focuses on DOA estimation algorithms for wideband sources. Specifically, this thesis proposes the pruned fast beamformer which can reduce the number of computations of Delay-and-Sum (DS) beamforming by using a multi-resolution structure. For high resolution methods, signal subspace methods are required. Most of the subspace techniques for wideband signals decompose the received wideband signals into several bands of narrowband signals through bandpass filtering. Then, there are two different ways of processing decomposed signals. The incoherent methods process each band independently by a given narrowband method and average the results. The coherent methods attempt to modulate the signals in each band so that they can be combined coherently. In this thesis, a new DOA estimator, which is called TOPS, is developed to avoid disadvantages of both the incoherent and the coherent methods. The new method which can be categorized as a non-coherent method is tested and compared with other methods. It exhibits many desirable features for a number of applications where the sources are wideband such as acoustic direction finding. |
