Direction-of-arrival estimation for a nested array with gain-phase error and impulse noise

Abstract

To solve direction-finding problems for nested arrays under conditions of impulse noise and gain–phase errors, this paper proposes a direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation method. First, a correntropy with an adaptive kernel length combined with an infinite norm of a variable weight value is proposed to suppress impulse noise. Then, the auxiliary array elements are used to realize the initial calibration of the amplitude and phase errors. On this basis, a DOA estimation method without a spectral peak search is proposed; this method is robust for arrays that still have residual gain–phase errors after calibration. Our method overcomes the difficulties of DOA estimation for nested arrays under conditions of gain–phase errors and impulse noise. Compared with traditional methods, the proposed method does not require prior knowledge, does not require a spectral peak search and has high superiority and robustness; a series of experiments have verified its superiority. In addition, a Cramér‒Rao bound (CRB) for angle estimation under conditions of gain–phase errors and impulse noise is proposed in this paper.