RxCV-based unitary SBL algorithm for off-grid DOA estimation with MIMO radar in unknown non-uniform noise

Abstract

As an indispensable part of array signal processing, direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation has been well investigated over the past few decades, and many excellent DOA estimation methods have been proposed. In this paper, a receiving domain covariance vector (RxCV) based unitary SBL algorithm is proposed for the off-grid DOA estimation of monostatic multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar in unknown non-uniform noise environment. In the proposed algorithm, the data received by MIMO radar is firstly transformed into receiving domain by a reshape operation. Then the RxCV-based unitary off-grid sparse model without non-uniform noise is constructed through unitary transformation and first-order linear approximation, where the unknown non-uniform noise is got rid off by a linear transformation. Based on the RxCV-based unitary off-grid sparse model, the sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) criterion is adopted to estimate the parameters, where signal variance and off-gird error are estimated by using expectation-maximization (EM) strategy. The DOA estimation is ultimately realized through 1-dimensional spectrum search of the received data. Results of the simulation experiments have provided the evidence of that the proposed algorithm is robustness against nonuniform noise and off-grid error, and it can maintain superior DOA estimation performance compared with other reported sparse signal representation based methods.