AN OFF-AXIS POLE FOCUSING METHOD FOR ROBUST DOA ESTIMATION USING
ROOT-MUSIC
Lalan Kumar, Amish Goel, and Rajesh M Hegde
Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur
Department of Electrical Engineering
{rhegde,lalank}@iitk.ac.in
ABSTRACT
An off-axis pole focusing method for robust Direction of Ar-
rival (DOA) estimation is presented in this paper. The roots
(poles) of the root-MUSIC polynomial are generally evalu-
ated over the unit circle in the z-domain. The DOAs can
be computed from these poles using a simple geometric re-
lation. Rather than computing the root-MUSIC polynomial
over the unit circle, it can be estimated inside the unit circle
at different radii. Such an off-axis estimation method along
with averaging shows higher robustness in DOA estimation.
This can particularly provide robustness in reverberant envi-
ronments where the roots (poles) are displaced due to the ef-
fects of multipath. Experiments on source localization are
conducted to evaluate the proposed method. The robustness
of the proposed method under reverberation is illustrated us-
ing DOA confidence interval plots. Experiments on distant
speech recognition are conducted under reverberant condi-
tions on the subset of spatialized version of TIMIT (S-TIMIT)
and MONC databases. The experimental results obtained for
both source localization and distant speech recognition indi-
cate a reasonable improvement over conventional sub-space
and correlation based methods.
Index Terms— root-MUSIC, Pole focusing, DOA, Off-
axis DOA estimation
1. INTRODUCTION
The computational efficiency of MUltiple SIgnal Classifica-
tion (MUSIC) method [1], is limited by the requirement of
a large number of sensors to resolve closely spaced sources
under reverberant environments. Alternately the root-MUSIC
[2] method is used in this context to obtain the DOA by solv-
ing a polynomial derived from the MUSIC spectrum. In this
paper, an off-axis pole focusing [3] method based on root-
MUSIC is proposed for high resolution DOA estimation un-
der reverberant environments. In the root-MUSIC method,
the inverse of an all pole MUSIC expression is expressed as a
polynomial. The roots (poles) of this polynomial are the DOA
This work was funded in part by TCS Research Scholarship Program
under project number TCS/CS/20110191.
estimates. Increasing the order of the polynomial by increas-
ing the number of sensors with reducing search path, provides
several off-axis poles. These off-axis pole candidates can be
averaged using a beam narrowing factor (ζ) as a weight to
provide a more accurate pole location or DOA estimate. This
weighted averaging performs well under reverberation and
reasonably restores the original pole location (DOA) that is
disturbed due to multipath. The rest of the paper is organized
as follows. The concept of off-axis pole focusing for DOA
estimation is introduced first. A complete description of pole
focusing algorithm is presented next. Experiments on source
localization and distant speech recognition are then described
followed by the conclusion.
2. THE OFF-AXIS POLE FOCUSING METHOD FOR
DOA ESTIMATION USING ROOT-MUSIC
The MUSIC method decomposes the covariance matrix of re-
ceived signals at multiple microphones [1]. In general, for M
signals acquired by a uniform linear array (ULA) consisting
of N identical sensors where N > M , the MUSIC spectrum,
is defined as
−1 H H
PM U SIC (θ) = s (θ)Qn Qn s(θ) (1)
where
s(θ) = [1 e−jkdsin(θ) e−j2kdsin(θ) · · · e−j(N −1)kdsin(θ) ]T
(2)
is the steering vector corresponding to the direction of arrival
θ. Note that Qn is N x (N − M ) noise eigenvector matrix,
k is wave number and d is the distance between two sensors.
The denominator of MUSIC spectrum becomes zero when θ
is the signal DOA which gives M peaks in the spectrum cor-
responding to M DOAs. Putting z = ejkdsin(θ) in Equation
2, and simplifying Equation 1, it can be written as [2]
−1 (N −1) −l
PM U SIC (θ) = Σl=−(N −1) Cl z (3)
Equation 3 defines a polynomial of degree (2N − 2) with
(2N − 2) zeros that form poles for root-MUSIC expression.
Both z and z1∗ , with same phase and reciprocal magnitude,
 1
1

Imaginary Part Est. Poles Imaginary Part Root−MUSIC

Actual pole 0.3
Pole Focusing 0.3
Actual
0.2
0.2
0.1
0.1
0
0
−0.1 −0.1
Real Part 1
1 Real Part
−0.2 0.9 −0.2
0.9
0.8 0.8
−0.3 −0.3
Real Part 0.7 Real Part
0.7
0.6 −0.4 Imaginary Part 0.6 −0.4
Imaginary Part

(a) (b)

Fig. 3. Magnified polar plot showing (a) all DOA (pole) candidates with sensors varying from from 3 to 12, shown in blue. (b)
comparison of DOA pole estimation from root-MUSIC using 12 sensors (blue), proposed method (brown), actual pole location
(red). Experiments conducted at SNR of 16dB, Reverberation time of 400ms. The sources are at 30◦ , 35◦ .

Fig. 1. Plot showing all roots (poles) obtained using root-

MUSIC at a SNR of 16 dB in a non-reverberant environment
using 12 sensors. The sources are at 30◦ , 35◦ . The poles in
red correspond to the DOAs
are the poles, one within the unit circle and another outside.
Of the (N − 1) poles within the unit circle, M poles closest
to the unit circle, are corresponding to M sources. This is
illustrated in Figure 1. The poles in red, are corresponding to
the two DOAs. If zm is the root of the polynomial then DOA
is given by
arg(zm )
θm = sin−1 [ ] m = 1 to M
kd
arg(zm ) = kdsin(θm )
It is clear from the Figure 1 that the poles corresponding to
DOAs, are very close to the unity circle. In highly noisy or
reverberated environment these poles are no more close to the
unit circle. They are scattered within the unit circle. The
proposed off-axis pole focusing approach addresses this issue
of accurate DOA estimation under reverberation errors. Ad-
ditionally it addresses the issue of using limited number of
sensors to provide higher resolution in DOA estimation.
Fig. 2. Illustration of the Pole focusing effect using six sen-
sors and twelve search paths. Solid arc represents bandwidth
of different poles separated by δr = .01. The red pentagram
represents actual pole (DOA).
2.1. Off-axis pole focusing under reverberant conditions
Under reverberation, root-MUSIC poles are dispersed within
unit circle. Hence searching the poles within unit circle is the
correct approach. The root-MUSIC polynomial in Equation
3, can be rewritten as
(4) −1 −1
+C2 z −2 +· · ·+C2N −2 z −(2N −2)
PM U SIC (θ) = C0 +C1 z
(5) (6)
In this case the search path is taken over the unit circle. As-
suming z = rejkdsin(θ) , where 0 ≤ r < 1, implies mov-
ing the search path inward which is equivalent to moving the
poles outwards to a larger radius [4]. Hence, such off-axis
search path for the poles (DOAs in root-MUSIC), will en-
hance the pole (DOA) location. This leads to reduction in
bandwidth of the pole, causing what is called the Pole Fo-
cusing Effect. Figure 2 shows that as the search path ap-
proaches the pole, bandwidth decreases. At each off-axis
search path, increasing the number of sensors along with re- 2.2.3. Estimating off-axis pole (DOA) candidates
ducing the search path radius gives more robust DOA estima-
Starting with the number of sensors for which the DOAs are
tion. This principle is the basis of proposed algorithm. With
resolved and with a search path over the unit circle, the num-
several DOA candidate poles obtained from different sensor
ber of sensors is increased further with reduction in search
data and several off-axis paths, an estimate of DOA is ob-
path radius. This is equivalent to substituting z = rejkdsinθ
tained by weighted averaging of the poles. The beam narrow-
in Equation 6, where 0 < r < 1. Moving search path in-
ing factor (ζ) (defined in Sec 2.2.4) of the poles is used as the
ward results in enhanced pole radius compared to radius of
weight in averaging process. The method improves the reso-
unit circle search path. The radius value starts from unity, de-
lution of the DOA estimates due to the off-axis pole averaging
creasing with a certain step size. In this work the step size is
under reverberation.
taken to be 0.01. It must be ensured that no pole outside the
Figure 3(a) shows all DOA candidate poles plotted for
unit circle is considered for pole enhancement. Since closely
sensors 3 to 12. The plot is at SNR 16dB and very low DRR,
spaced sources are considered herein, all the resolved DOA
2.41dB with equivalent reverberation time as 400ms. Initially,
poles within range of ±10◦ of pivot DOA candidate are taken
with low number of sensors, root-MUSIC is unable to resolve
as DOA candidate poles. The poles obtained in each off-axis
DOAs. It is observed that only one pole lies close to the me-
path are first recorded. Among them, the candidate poles hav-
dian value of the two DOAs under consideration. Such poles
ing argument lower than that of the pivot pole, are considered
can be seen in middle region of actual DOA pole argument,
along with their corresponding radius values for the lower
indicated by the two lines in the figure. On increasing the
DOA. The remaining poles are used for the higher DOA.
number of sensors the DOAs start getting resolved, but their
locations are quite within the unit circle and away from the ac- 2.2.4. Computing the Beam Narrowing Factor (BNF) of the
tual DOAs. By applying the pole focusing method and aver- off-axis pole (DOA) candidates
aging over all resolved candidates thus obtained, the resultant
DOA is more closer to the actual DOA. Figure 3(b) shows that As explained in Section 2, both z and z1∗ are the roots of Equa-
argument (and hence DOA) of the pole resulting from pole fo- tion 6, with same phase and reciprocal magnitude. Hence,
cusing is closer when compared to conventional root-MUSIC. writing these roots as

2.2. Algorithm for DOA estimation using off-axis pole fo- zm = e∓σm T eiωm T
cusing
where,
The block diagram of the proposed method to resolve closely ωm T = kdsin(θm ) (7)
spaced sources, is illustrated in Figure 4. A detailed discus-
and T is sampling interval. The bandwidth (BW ) of the pole
will be approximately 2σm [5]. It is related with the magni-
tude (radius) of the pole by the equation

|zm | = e−σm T (8)

The beam narrowing factor for every pole obtained can be

computed as
ω
ζ= (9)
Fig. 4. Block diagram of the Off-axis Pole focusing method BW
where ω is argument of the pole given by Equation 5.
sion on the proposed algorithm including the description of
2.2.5. Computation of final DOA using weighted averaging
the individual blocks is presented in following section.
and scaling
2.2.1. Estimating minimum number of sensors to resolve
ground truth DOAs The weighted averaging is performed with BNF as the weight.
The weights are applied on the argument and radius of the off-
For fewer sensors, root-MUSIC is unable to resolve two axis poles to give
closely spaced sources under reverberant conditions. Hence
the method starts with a minimum number of sensors, sat- Σi ωi ζi Σi ri ζi
ωp = and rp = (10)
isfying the condition N > M . The number of sensors is Σi ζi Σi ζi
increased till the two DOAs are resolved. Up to this number
where,
of sensors, the search path is taken on unity circle.
ωp = Argument of pole using pole focusing
2.2.2. Computing the pivot pole candidate rp = radius of pole using pole focusing
ωi = Argument of ith off-axis pole
All the unresolved DOA pole candidates are averaged as in
ri = radius of ith off-axis pole
Section 2.2.5 to get the pivot DOA pole candidate.
ζi = The corresponding BNF.
The final DOA is computed by scaling the estimated argu-
ment as in Equation 4. The steps in the proposed method are
enumerated in Algorithm 1.
Algorithm 1 Algorithm for DOA estimation using pole fo-
cusing
1: Set-up two closely spaced sources with separation of 5◦ .
2: Initialize P , the number of sensors such that P > M ,
where M = no. of sources, and search path radius r = 1.
3: Compute DOA pole candidate using root-MUSIC with
z = rejkdsinθ .
4: If only one pole candidate is found, P = P + 1, goto step
3.
5: Average all single pole candidates to get pivot pole. Num-
ber of sensors required to resolve ground truth DOAs is
P . Set N = P
6: N = N +1, set r = r−rstep where rstep = .01. Store the
pole candidates with search radius and argument, found
using root-MUSIC with z = rejkdsinθ , if it is within ±10
of pivot.
7: If N<12, Go to step 6
8: Compute BNF (ζ) = BW ω
, over all off-axis poles.
9: Compute all off-axis poles below and above the pivot pole
corresponding to two DOAs.
10: Compute the weighted average on the two sets of Poles,
as ωp = ΣΣi ωi ζiiζi and rp = ΣΣi ri ζi ζi i
11: The final DOA is obtained from Equation 4.
3. PERFORMANCE EVALUATION
In this Section, the performance of the proposed method is
evaluated by conducting two experiments. The first experi-
ment is on source localization. The result is presented as con-
fidence interval (CI) plot. In the second experiment, distant
speech recognition experiments in a meeting room environ-
ment are conducted over a microphone array. The results are
compared to the root-MUSIC and correlation based methods.
Table 1. Source and Microphone locations used in the exper-
iments
Source 1 [3.5 2.48 1.4]T Source 2 [3.47 2.45 1.4]T
Mic 1 [3.0 2.5 1.0]T Mic 2 [3.0 2.55 1.0]T
3.1. Experimental Conditions
The proposed algorithm was tested in a typical meeting room
environments. A room with dimensions, 7.3m×6.2m×3.4m
was used in the experiments. The position (with respect to one
of the corners of the room) for two sources and a two element
Uniform Linear Array (ULA), is shown in table 1. Additional
microphones are placed in similar fashion, while maintain-
ing linearity and uniform distance between two microphones.
Three microphones are used in the beginning and then grad-
ually increased up to twelve. The experiments are performed
at different reverberation times (T60). The room impulse re-
sponse is generated by image method [6] as implemented in
[7]. Figure 5 shows the experimental set-up for the experi-
ments on source localization and distant speech recognition.
Fig. 5. Figure illustrating the experimental conditions
3.2. Experiments on source localization
To check the resolving power of the proposed method with
limited number of sensors, a ULA of nine sensors is con-
sidered from the given set-up. The sources spaced apart by
2◦ is used in the experiment. The method is compared with
root-MUSIC and root-MUSIC with forward-backward (FB)
smoothing [8]. The number of microphones in subarray for
FB smoothing is five. The result is presented as confidence
interval (CI) plots. Confidence interval (CI) is defined as in-
terval estimate of a population parameter. It is used to in-
dicate the reliability of an estimate. Figure 6 shows 95%
confidence interval of mean DOA estimate for pole focusing,
root-MUSIC and forward-backward root-MUSIC (FB RM)
at different reverberation time (T60). It is clear from the up-
per and lower limit of pole focusing confidence interval that
the mean DOA estimate of pole focusing is always closer to
actual DOA than that of root-MUSIC or forward-backward
root-MUSIC. The CI plot is shown for both the sources.
3.3. Experiments on distant speech recognition
Speaker independent speech recognition experiments were
conducted for reconstructed speech acquired over micro-
phone arrays. A filter and sum beamformer was trained using
the DOA estimates obtained. The experimental results are
presented as % word accuracies (WAcc ). The % WAcc is
calculated as
(Wn − (Ws + Wd + Wi ))
W Acc = · 100
Wn
where Wn is the total number of words, Ws the total number
of substitutions, Wd the total number of deletions, and Wi
the total number of insertions. To ensure conformity with
standard databases, we used subset of spatialized version
of TIMIT [9], S-TIMIT data. Additional experiments are
also performed on the Multiple Overlap Numbers Corpus
Table 2. Distant speech recognition performance as % accuracy at various reverberation times (T60), MONC I : Isolated digit
performance, MONC II : Connected digit performance.

Database CTM PF RM FB RM MUSIC GCC-PHAT GCC-ROTH

T60=150 T60=400 T60=150 T60=400 T60=150 T60=400 T60=150 T60=400 T60=150 T60=400 T60=150 T60=400
MONC I 98.4% 94% 93.45% 93.45% 92.88% 92.35% 91.10% 92.35% 88.08% 82.74% 81.49% 79.36% 78.47%
MONC II 88.58% 84.33% 83.89% 84.0% 83.29% 83.37% 83.33% 83.19% 81.45% 75.65% 73.58% 74.72% 70.88%
S-TIMIT 93.27% 91.4% 90.55% 90.8% 90.48% 90.54% 88.7% 85.6% 84.14% 79.56% 76.63% 78.04% 76.47%

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Fig. 6. Confidence interval plots of DOA estimation perfor-
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4. CONCLUSION
An off-axis pole focusing method using the root-MUSIC is
proposed in this work for robust DOA estimation under re-
verberant environments. The pole focusing provides reason-
ably more accurate source localization under reverberation
when compared to conventional root-MUSIC and FB root-
MUSIC for closely spaced sources. The off-axis DOA esti-
mation with weighted averaging provides robust DOA esti-
mation. An adaptive version of this algorithm for real time
implementation is currently being studied for voiced based
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