DOA estimation of coexisted noncoherent and coherent signals via sparse representation of cleaned array covariance matrix

A new direction finding method is presented to deal with coexisted noncoherent and coherent signals without smoothing operation. First the direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation task is herein reformulated as a sparse reconstruction problem of the cleaned array covariance matrix, which is processed to eliminate the affection of the noise. Then by using the block of matrices, the information of DOAs which we pursuit are implied in the sparse coefficient matrix. Finally, the sparse reconstruction problem is solved by the improved M-FOCUSS method, which is applied to the situation of block of matrices. This method outperforms its data domain counterpart in terms of noise suppression, and has a better performance in DOA estimation than the customary spatial smoothing technique. Simulation results verify the efficacy of the proposed method.