Study of signal source number estimators

The Hough transform estimation method is studied. It maps the eigenvalue of sample covariance matrices of observation data onto the Hough space, and thus the number of signal source is determined. Based on diagonal loading, a better Hough transform estimation method is proposed, the effect of small eigenvalues on the estimation of source numbers could be reduced by diagonally loading the corresponding correlation matrix, and the performance of the methods for determining the number of sources of colored noise can he improved. Simulation result validates that the Hough transform estimation method has a better performance compared with the akaike information and minimum description length criteria. Futhermore, Simulation results showed that the diagonal loading is effective to the performance improvement of the estimators. The new method can gain a relatively high detection performance even at low snap shot or in colored noise.