Nonparametric method for detecting the number of narrowband signals without eigendecomposition in array processing
Jingmin Xin, Yoji Ohashi, Akira Sano · 2006
A computational simple and efficient nonparametric method for estimating the number of signals without eigendecompo-sition (MENSE) is proposed for the narrowband signals im-pinging on a uniform linear array (ULA). When finite array data are available, a new detection criterion is formulated in terms of the row elements of the QR upper-triangular fac-tor of the auto-product of a matrix formed from the cross-correlations between some sensor data. Then the number of signals is determined as a value for which this ratio criterion is maximized, where the QR decomposition with column pivoting is also used to improve detection performance. The proposed estimator is asymptotically consistent, and it is su-perior in detecting closely-spaced signals with a small num-ber of snapshots and/or at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). 1.