Propagator-based computationally efficient direction finding via low-dimensional equation rooting

Abstract

Direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation of multiple emitters with sensor arrays has been a hot topic in the area of signal processing during the past decades. Among the existing DOA estimation methods, the subspace-based ones have attracted a lot of research interest, mainly due to their satisfying performance in direction estimation precision and super-resolution of temporally overlapping signals. However, subspace-based DOA estimation methods usually contain procedures of covariance matrix decomposition and refined spatial searching, which are computationally much demanding and significantly deteriorate the computational efficiency of these methods. Such a drawback in heavy computational load of the subspace-based methods has further blocked the application of them in practical systems. In this paper, we follow the major process of the subspace-based methods to propose a new DOA estimation algorithm, and devote ourselves to reduce the computational load of the two procedures of covariance matrix decomposition and spatial searching, so as to improve the overall efficiency of the DOA estimation method. To achieve this goal, we first introduce the propagator method to realize fast estimation of the signal-subspace, and then establish a DOA-dependent characteristic polynomial equation (CPE) with its order equaling the number of incident signals (which is generally much smaller than that of array sensors) based on the signal-subspace estimate. The DOA estimates are finally obtained by solving the low-dimensional CPE. The computational loads of both the subspace estimation and DOA calculation procedures are thus largely reduced when compared with the corresponding procedures in traditional subspace-based DOA estimation methods, e.g., MUSIC. Theoretical analyses and numerical examples are carried out to demonstrate the predominance of the proposed method in both DOA estimation precision and computational efficiency over existing ones.