A Reduced Complexity Approach to IAA Beamforming for Efficient DOA Estimation of Coherent Sources

We address the 2D direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation problem in scenarios with coherent sources. More specifically, we adopt beamforming solutions based on the iterative adaptive approach (IAA) recently proposed in the literature. The motivation of such adoption mainly comes from the excellent behavior these beamformers provide in scenarios with coherent sources. Nonetheless, these strategies suffer from a prohibitive computational complexity, especially in 2D scenarios. In order to alleviate the, we propose two reduced-complexity (RC) versions of the IAA and IAA based on maximum likelihood (IAA-ML) algorithms. The proposed beamformers are referred to as IAA-RC and IAA-ML-RC and provide similar results to those obtained with their original counterparts. Computational complexity, however, is further reduced. Numerical results presented in the paper show that the computational burden can be decreased by a 52% with our proposed solutions in the considered scenarios.