Direction-of-arrival estimation for coprime array using compressive sensing based array interpolation

Abstract

A method of direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation using array interpolation is proposed in this paper to increase the number of resolvable sources and improve the DOA estimation performance for coprime array configuration with holes in its virtual array. The virtual symmetric nonuniform linear array (VSNLA) of coprime array signal model is introduced, with the conventional MUSIC with spatial smoothing algorithm (SS-MUSIC) applied on the continuous lags in the VSNLA; the degrees of freedom (DoFs) for DOA estimation are obviously not fully exploited. To effectively utilize the extent of DoFs offered by the coarray configuration, a compressing sensing based array interpolation algorithm is proposed. The compressing sensing technique is used to obtain the coarse initial DOA estimation, and a modified iterative initial DOA estimation based interpolation algorithm (IMCA-AI) is then utilized to obtain the final DOA estimation, which maps the sample covariance matrix of the VSNLA to the covariance matrix of a filled virtual symmetric uniform linear array (VSULA) with the same aperture size. The proposed DOA estimation method can efficiently improve the DOA estimation performance. The numerical simulations are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.