Sparse Bayesian Learning-Based Direction Finding Method With Unknown Mutual Coupling Effect.

The direction finding performance is degraded by the unknown mutual coupling effect between antennas. In this paper, we address the problem of direction finding in the uniform linear array (ULA) system with the unknown mutual coupling effect. To exploit the signal sparsity in the spatial domain, a sparse Bayesian learning (SBL)-based model is formulated. By discretizing the direction area into grids, the direction finding problem is transformed into a sparse reconstruction problem. Additionally, to overcome both the mutual coupling effect between antennas and the off-grid problem in discretizing the direction area, an off-grid SBL model with mutual coupling vector is proposed. Then, with the distribution assumptions of unknown parameters including the noise variance, the off-grid vector, the signals and the mutual coupling vector, et al., a novel direction finding method based on SBL with unknown mutual coupling effect, named DFSMC, is proposed. With theoretically deriving the estimation expressions for all the unknown parameters, an expectation maximum (EM)-based method is adopted in DFSMC. Simulation results show that the proposed DFSMC method can significantly outperform the state-of-art direction finding methods in the ULA system with unknown mutual coupling effect.