Direction-of-arrival estimation method based on least-squares by reconstructing covariance matrix with automatic diagonal loading

When a small number of snapshots are used, the performance of the direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation method based on the least squares (LS) degrades severely because of inadequate estimation of the covariance matrix. Although the subspace-based DOA estimation methods were proposed to improve the performance of DOA estimation method based on the LS; however these methods are computationally complex, especially for a large number of array elements. In this Letter, the DOA estimation method based on the LS is improved by reconstructing the covariance matrix with diagonal loading, where the diagonal loading factor is computed automatically by estimating the signal power. The reciprocal of the array pattern is taken to calculate the spatial spectrum, where the peak values correspond to the estimated DOAs of signals. The proposed method can achieve better performance with few snapshots and low computational complexity. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by the numerical simulations.