Global Robustness Characterization of DOA Estimators by Breakdown Detection
Herbert Groll, Erich Zöchmann, Peter Gerstoft, Christoph F. Mecklenbräuker · 2019
We characterize the global robustness of direction of arrival (DOA) estimators against additive outliers in the sensor array data by detection of the estimator's breakdown. The proposed method contaminates a given proportion of the sensor array data and observes the corresponding DOA estimate. An oracle compares the DOA estimation error magnitude with a chosen tolerance. The oracle detects that the DOA estimate has broken down when the magnitude of error exceeds the tolerance. The estimator's robustness is thus globally characterized in a robustness operating characteristic (ROC) curve which shows the true positive rate of detected breakdowns versus the false positive rate. The ROC curve is evaluated for several DOA estimators: conventional, phase-only, and weighted phase-only beamformer, as well as least absolute deviation based DOA estimator.