A covariance matrix shrinkage method with Toeplitz rectified target for DOA estimation under the uniform linear array

A covariance matrix shrinkage method is proposed to make an improvement of the direction of arrival (DOA) estimation under a uniform linear array in a scenario where the number of sensors is large and the sample size is relatively small. The main contribution is that we provide a shrinkage target with Toeplitz structure and deduce a closed-form estimation of the shrinkage coefficient. The closed-form and the expectation of the shrinkage coefficient estimate are calculated based on the unbiased and consistent estimates of the trace and moments of a Wishart distributed covariance matrix. The statistical property of the shrinkage coefficient estimate is discussed through theoretical analysis and simulations, which demonstrate the shrinkage coefficient estimate can ensure that the proposed covariance matrix estimate is a good compromise between the sample covariance matrix (SCM) and the target. The root-mean-square-error (RMSE) simulations of DOA estimation show that the proposed method can improve the multiple signal classification (MUSIC) DOA estimation performance in the case of low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) with small sample size, and also can provide a satisfactory performance at high SNR.