Direction of arrival estimation based on information geometry

In this paper, a new direction of arrival (DOA) estimation approach is devised using concepts from information geometry (IG). The proposed method uses geodesic distances in the statistical manifold of probability distributions parametrized by their covariance matrix to estimate the direction of arrival of several sources. In order to obtain a practical method, the DOA estimation is treated as a single-variable optimization problem, for which the DOA solutions are found by means of a line search. The relation between the proposed method and MVDR beamformer is elucidated. An evaluation of its performance is carried out by means of Monte Carlo simulations and it is shown that the proposed method provides improved resolution capabilities at low SNR with respect to MUSIC and MVDR.