Integrated method of multi-target detection and DOA estimation by exploiting knowledge of beam-spectra envelope

An integrated method of acoustic signal detection and direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation is proposed. As exploiting the beam-spectra envelop (BE) knowledge of the spatial spectrum outputted by beam scanning system, it is named as BE method, in which, based on the results of energy detection, the 3 dB-width information of spectral peaks is used further to detect the source number in each peak, and the DOAs are estimated by 2-D Capon searching. The Qiandao Lake experimental results show that, comparing with traditional algorithms, the performance of target detection and DOA estimation is improved at lower SNRs.