DOA estimation based on density-tapered thinned array

Abstract

In this paper, several classical DOA estimation methods are applied to density-tapered thinned array. The density-tapered thinned array has the advantage that there is no grating lobe in the whole angle scanning range, and the unambiguous angle estimation of the target is obtained. The experimental results show that the classical DOA estimation method can be applied directly to the density-tapered thinned array to obtain satisfactory results, which lays a foundation for the practical application of the density-tapered thinned array. In addition, the effects of sparsity and number of elements on DOA estimation are analyzed, and the advantages of density-tapered thinned array over uniform arrays are verified.