Joint estimation of source number and DOA using simulated annealing algorithm

The array signal processing problem has to do with two main issues: 1) the determination of source number; and 2) estimation of the directions-of-arrival (DOA) of these sources. In the classical methods, the determination of source number and the estimation of DOA parameters are executed independently rather than jointly. To jointly estimate source number and DOA, this paper proposes a simulated annealing-based algorithm. The key points of this paper are: i) the prior choices for some unknown parameters are calibrated to compute more efficiently; ii) a penalty term for the parameter number is added to the corresponding objective function Additionally to avoid overfitting; and iii) in order to move to the regions of interest quickly, some cumulants of properly chosen sensor outputs from the uniform linear array (ULA) is computed and their moduluses of Fourier transform (MFT) are mapped trickly to the uniform distribution. Finally simulation results are presented to validate the performance of the proposed method.