Domain Adaptation for DoA Estimation in Multipath Channels With Interferences
Amitay Bar, Joseph S. Picard, Israel Cohen, Ronen Talmon · IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing · 2025
We consider the problem of estimating the direction-of-arrival (DoA) of a desired source located in a known region of interest in the presence of interfering sources and multipath. We propose an approach that precedes DoA estimation and relies on generating a set of reference steering vectors. The steering vectors’ generative model is a free-space model, which is beneficial for many DoA estimation algorithms. The set of reference steering vectors is then used to compute a function that maps the received signals from the adverse environment to a reference domain free from interfering sources and multipath. We show theoretically and empirically that the proposed map, analogous to domain adaption, improves DoA estimation by mitigating interference and multipath effects. Specifically, we demonstrate a substantial improvement in accuracy when the proposed approach is applied before three commonly used beamformers: the delay-and-sum (DS), the minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR), and the Multiple Signal Classification (MUSIC).