A novel accurate source number estimation method based on GBSA-MDL algorithm

Abstract

Several classical source number estimation methods have been proposed in the past based on information theoretic criteria such as minimum description length (MDL). However, in most known real applications there is a scenario in which the number of sensors goes to infinity at the same speed as the number of snapshots (general asymptotic case) which yields to a blind performance for the classical MDL and results in an inaccurate source number estimation. Accordingly, in this work, the Galaxy Based Search Algorithm (GBSA) is modified and applied with the MDL criteria in order to optimize and correct the detection of source number under such sample-starving case. Simulation results show that the proposed GBSA-MDL based method gives reliable results compared to several used source number estimation methods.