Conventional direction of arrival (DOA) estimation methods for known waveform sources have often assumed the noise being Gaussian distribution. However, the impulsive noise are frequently encountered in practice, which may severely degrade their estimation performance. To deal with this problem, we firstly construct a hybrid cost function to obtain the matrix related to unknown DOAs and complex amplitudes in the presence of impulsive noise. Then, by incorporating the majorization-minimization (MM) framework, the cost function is optimized iteratively. Finally, the DOAs and complex amplitudes are estimated via using the inherent relationship of the matrix calculated from the MM step. As demonstrated by simulation results, for strongly impulsive noise, the proposed method has a better estimation performance than many existing methods. Moreover, it can handle both weakly and strongly impulsive cases effectively.

Direction of arrival estimation; known waveform; impulsive noise; majorization-minimization