Simple Direction-of-Arrival Estimation under Nonuniform Noise Scenarios

The uniform white noise assumption is widely applied for most of the existing direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation methods, which however may degrade the estimation performance. In practical scenarios, the nonuniform white noise model is more adequate. In this paper, we propose a simple DOA estimation method in the presence of spatially nonuniform white noise with unknown noise covariance matrix. The estimate of the unknown noise covariance matrix is firstly obtained by utilizing the shift property of identical subarrays. Then, the received signal covariance matrix is prewhitened by the estimated noise covariance, which can overcome the biased estimate of signal covariance. Finally, the performance improvement is verified by simulations in terms of resolution ability and estimation accuracy.