Eigenbeam-ESPRIT for DOA-Vector Estimation

Abstract

Several techniques exist to estimate the directions of arrival (DOAs) of sound sources captured with a spherical microphone array. The eigenbeam rotational invariance technique (EB-ESPRIT) uses recurrence relations of spherical harmonics to estimate the DOAs. In this letter, we propose a new EB-ESPRIT method which uses three recurrence relations and a joint-diagonalization procedure to estimate the unit-vectors pointing to the source DOAs. We evaluate the angular estimation errors of the proposed method under noisy and reverberant conditions and compare it to existing EB-ESPRIT methods. We find that our proposed method can estimate the source DOAs with higher accuracy compared to the discussed existing EB-ESPRIT methods, and the estimation accuracy does not depend on the source DOAs.