Two Novel Two-Stage Direction of Arrival Estimation Algorithms for Two-Dimensional Mixed Noncircular and Circular Sources

Sensors (Basel). 2017 Jun 18;17(6):1433. doi: 10.3390/s17061433.

Abstract

This paper addresses the two-dimensional (2D) direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation problem with two novel methods for mixed noncircular and circular signals. The first proposed method is named the two-stage direction-of-arrival matrix (TSDOAM) method, and the other is called the two-stage rank reduction (TSRARE) method. The proposed methods utilize both the circularity and the direction-of-arrival differences between the noncircular and circular sources to estimate the 2D directions-of-arrival (DOAs). The maximum detectable 2D angle parameters of the TSDOAM and TSRARE methods are twice those of the existing methods. Moreover, the TSRARE method can detect more incident signals than the TSDOAM method due to the array aperture of two parallel uniform linear arrays (ULAs) being fully utilized. Simulation results show that compared to the existing methods for the small angle separation of 2D directions-of-arrival, the two proposed methods perform well in terms of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and snapshots.

Keywords: 2D direction-of-arrival estimation; circularity difference; noncircular signal; small angle separation.