A novel universal preprocessing approach for high-resolution direction-of-arrival estimation

Abstract

A novel universal preprocessing method is proposed to estimate angles of arrival, which is applicable to one- or two-dimensional high resolution processing based on arbitrary center-symmetric arrays (such as uniform linear arrays, equal-spaced rectangular planar arrays and symmetric circular arrays). By mapping the complex signal space into the real one, the new method can effectively reduce the computation needed by the signal subspace direction finding techniques without any performance degradation. In addition, the new preprocessing scheme itself can decorrelate the coherent signals received on the array. For regular array geometry such as uniform linear arrays and equal-spaced rectangular planar arrays, the popular spatial smoothing preprocessing technique can be combined with the novel approach to improve the decorrelating ability. Simulation results confirm the above conclusions.