Roust direction of arrival estimation method with high accuracy for single vector sensor

The phase errors among the components of a single acoustic vector sensor cause the Direction-Of-Arrival (DOA) estimation error of the existing methods. In order to address this issue, a DOA estimation method is proposed, which is robust to the phase errors. The proposed method first utilizes the Hadamard product of the principal eigenvector of the covariance matrix of the received signal by the single vector sensor and its conjugate vector to construct the spatial spectrum in order to estimate the DOA of the underwater target. Since the Hadamard product eliminates the phase errors, this estimation is independent of the phase errors. However, it is ambiguous. Afterwards, the phase-error estimate is explored to eliminate the ambiguity and get the correct DOA estimate. The proposed method performs independently of the phase errors and obtains high accuracy. The simulation results and the experimental result demonstrate the proposed method is robust to the phase errors. Furthermore, in the presence of the phase errors, it performs better than the average acoustic intensity method, the CAPON method, and the MUSIC method, in terms of estimation accuracy. In addition, the simulation results indicate that the estimation accuracy of the proposed method approaches to the CRB.