A novel DOA estimation method for uncorrelated and coherent signals via compressed sensing in sparse arrays

Abstract

When there is the coexistence of uncorrelated and coherent signals in sparse arrays, the conventional algorithms using coarray are fail. In order to solve this problem, the letter proposes a novel method based on compressed sensing. Firstly, the authors vectorize the covariance matrix and establish a sparse representation model through constructing a two-dimensional redundant dictionary. Then, the authors use an improved orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm for off-grid sources to recover the sparse vector. Through analysing location of non-zero elements in sparse vector, the direction-of-arrivals of both uncorrelated and coherent signals can be obtained. The proposed method has no strict limitation by the structure of the existing sparse arrays. Moreover, it makes full use of vectorized data and can estimate more number of signals than that of sensors. Numerical experiments prove the effectiveness and favourable performance of the proposed method.