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A direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation method using an array antenna has been developed based on a database retrieval technique. This method uses a database consisting of a set of correlation matrices of the array output vectors for various combinations of the quantized angles and signal powers. When a correlation matrix is estimated from an observed output vector, several correlation matrices close to the estimated one are searched out from the database, and the DOA is estimated based on the retrieved data. This method gives an accurate estimation, but the use of uniform quantization step size requires a large amount of storage space. In this paper, the relation between the quantization step size and the estimation accuracy is analyzed, and a nonuniform quantization scheme is developed to reduce the database size without sacrificing the estimation accuracy. A clustering technique is also introduced to alleviate the performance degradation caused by the retrieval of data which have similar correlation matrices but have much different angles. We show by simulations that the nonuniform quantization reduces the database size and the clustering improves the estimation accuracy, and that the proposed method is applicable to the array of three elements at the present. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]