DOA estimation via ULA with mutual coupling in the presence of non-uniform noise

Abstract It is well known that classic direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation methods yield poor accuracy and low resolution in the presence of mutual coupling and non-uniform noise. To tackle this problem, a DOA estimation method for jointly optimizing noise-free covariance matrix and mutual coupling coefficient is proposed in this paper. Based on the least squares (LS) criterion, the signal subspace and noise-free covariance matrix under mutual coupling can be obtained in an iterative manner. With the determined signal/noise subspace, the mutual coupling matrix can be reconstructed and the covariance one is estimated after mutual coupling compensation. Finally, the noise-free covariance matrix is preprocessed by spatial smoothing strategy and then used to determine the DOAs with the help of traditional DOA estimators. Compared to the conventional DOA estimation methods, simulation results demonstrate that, the proposed method can suppress the non-uniform noise significantly, alleviate the effect of mutual coupling on spatial smoothing technique obviously, as well as improve the DOA estimation performance in the case of coherent signals considerably.