A Novel ULA-Difference-Coarray-Based DOA Estimation Method for General Coherent Signals

Abstract EN

In this article, a difference-coarray-based direction of arrival (DOA) method is introduced, which utilizes the uniform linear array (ULA) in a novel fashion to address the problem of DOA estimation for coherent signals.

Inspired by the coarray-based estimators employed in cases of sparse arrays, we convert the sample covariance matrix of the observed signals into the difference coarray domain and process the signals using a spatial smoothing technique.

The proposed method exhibits good accuracy and robustness in both the uncorrelated and coherent cases.

Numerical simulations verify that the ULA difference coarray- (UDC-) based method can achieve good DOA estimation accuracy even when the SNR is very low.

In addition, the UDC-based method is insensitive to the number of snapshots.

Under extremely challenging conditions, the proposed UDC-ES-DOA method is preferred because of its outstanding robustness, while the UDC-MUSIC method is suitable for most moderate cases of lower complexity.

Due to its demonstrated advantages, the proposed method is a promising and competitive solution for practical DOA estimation, especially for low-SNR or snapshot-limited applications.