J Sign Process Syst DOI 10.1007/s11265-009-0413-9 DOA Estimation for Multiple Sparse Sources with Arbitrarily Arranged Multiple Sensors

Abstract This paper proposes a method for estimat-ing the direction of arrival (DOA) of multiple source signals for an underdetermined situation, where the number of sources N exceeds the number of sensors M (M < N). Some DOA estimation methods have al-ready been proposed for underdetermined cases. How-ever, since most of them restrict their microphone array arrangements, their DOA estimation ability is limited to a 2-dimensional plane. To deal with an underde-termined case where sources are distributed arbitrar-ily, we propose a method that can employ a 2- or 3-dimensional sensor array. Our new method employs the source sparseness assumption to handle an un-derdetermined case. Our formulation with the sen-sor coordinate vectors allows us to employ arbitrarily arranged sensors easily. We obtained promising exper-imental results for 2-dimensionally distributed sensors and sources 3 × 4, 3 × 5 (#sensors × #speech sources), and for 3-dimensional case with 4 × 5 in a room (rever-beration time (RT) of 120 ms). We also investigate th