Applied Acoustics 71 (2010) 493

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Applied Acoustics
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/apacoust

Book review
Classical and Modern Direction-of-Arrival Estimation, T.E. Tuncer, B. Friedland (Eds.). Academic Press. 78.99 GBP, ISBN: 9780123745248 The book, published in September 2009, gives a comprehensive overview of methods for estimating the direction of arrival (DOA) or position of single or multiple sources. While DOA estimation is generally seen in the larger context of array processing, this book, unlike similar works, concentrates specically on this topic and does not discuss related subjects like noise reduction or de-reverberation. The book comprises 10 self-contained chapters, written by different authors. It starts with a brief overview of classical techniques, namely steered response power (SRP), the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) and MUSIC, and gives a rst impression of their accuracy and resolution. The second chapter concerns the design of a direction nding system and the problems associated in practice with radio signal reception, like multipath propagation or coupling between antennas and support structures. In the third chapter, the subject of array calibration is addressed, especially calibration with a source at known position and extrapolation of the data obtained for these positions to the whole range of DOAs. Chapter four is concerned with the use of non-uniform array geometries. Potentially, these offer large advantages over uniform arrays with the same number of sensors. It discusses how to map them to an equivalent uniform virtual array. This chapter also provides details of broadband signal processing. Chapter ve offers an overview of the very efcient search free methods (e.g. root-MUSIC and ESPRIT) and demonstrates how these techniques can be modied to be used with non-uniform arrays for which they were not originally developed. Chapter six describes the exploitation of spectraltemporal characteristics of the source signal for an improved DOA estimation. Many signals of interest show distinct patterns (signatures) in the spectraltemporal domain, identiable in a spectrogram, so that a selection of the associated timefrequency points seems advisable. In chapter seven, the performance of MUSIC is compared with that of MLE. Small sample sizes result in a breakdown of the MUSIC performance at much higher SNRs compared to using a maximum likelihood estimator. Chapter eight deals with using higher order statistics for source location. Many source signals feature information content (e.g. lower entropy) not present in the Gaussian background noise. This can be exploited and enables the location of a higher number of sources with a given number of sensors compared to conventional second order (variance/power) based statistics. The ninth chapter gives the only example of the location of acoustical sources. It features time-difference-of-arrival-based source position estimation (TDOA) as well as strategies for automatic sensor position determination. Chapter 10 also investigates source position estimation (in a 2D space) using a number of spatially separated arrays. Unlike in common practice, it is suggested that it is advantageous to utilise the data from the arrays directly in a single-step procedure. This is in contrast to rst conducting DOA estimation for every array and then combining the results.
doi:10.1016/j.apacoust.2009.11.011

A main strength of the book is that is dedicated wholly to DOA estimation. Consequently it is able to deal with a wide range of problems associated with this subject, including specialist ones not covered in other books. Moreover, the information provided can generally be considered to be up-to-date. Nevertheless there are some weaknesses arising from the fact that source location techniques traditionally originate from radio communications. Most of the book refers to narrowband, far eld cases or deals with problems specic to processing radio/communication signals. This reduces its usefulness, for example, with respect to source location in the audio frequency domain. Typically, audio signals are broadband. Broadband DOA estimation is not a straight-forward extension of a narrowband method and is not suited at all to some narrowband techniques. On the other hand, since the source array distance is often not sufciently large compared to the array size, the array response is not only a function of the DOA but also of the distance. If this is not taken into account, DOA estimates can become biased, but it also enables the position itself to be derived from the data of a single array, as demonstrated in chapter nine of the book. One wishes that the book dealt more with this phenomenon or, more generally, with matched eld processing. This book is not a particularly useful reference for those new to the eld. The introduction to classical methods is rather short and does not include any generalised cross correlation based methods. In addition, the book lacks a coherent structure. It is difcult to spot the relationships between the individual chapter topics, which appear to have been chosen somewhat randomly. One wishes that the book addressed some additional techniques directly related to source localisation, such as beamforming in general (e.g. the MVDR beamformer or null steering). Especially for broadband processing in a multidimensional parameter space (like azimuth and elevation), search-based methods can be slow. It would have been benecial to discuss efcient methods for global optimisation like stochastic region contraction (SRC). Some more information on source number estimation would have been appreciated also. Although this book offers information on a wide range of current techniques for DOA determination, it is mainly targeted at a very specic audience i.e. those concerned with wireless communication already having basic knowledge of the subject. In this respect the title is a little misleading. Notwithstanding my various criticisms, I consider that this book is a good and useful contribution to the literature. R. Kruse Visiting Research Fellow, Department of Design, Development, Environment and Materials, The Open University, MK7 6AA, UK Tel.: +44 1908 3 32391; fax: +441908 653858. E-mail address: r.kruse@open.ac.uk Available online 16 December 2009