Spatial smoothing based methods for direction-of-arrival estimation of coherent signals in nonuniform noise

Spatial smoothing techniques have been widely used to estimate the directions-of-arrival (DOAs) of coherent signals. However, in general these techniques are derived under the condition of uniform white noise and, therefore, their performance may be significantly deteriorated when nonuniform noise occurs. This motivates us to develop new methods for DOA estimation of coherent signals in nonuniform noise in this paper. In our methods, the noise covariance matrix is first directly or iteratively calculated from the array covariance matrix. Then, the noise component in the array covariance matrix is eliminated to achieve a noise-free array covariance matrix. By mitigating the effect of noise nonuniformity, conventional spatial smoothing techniques developed for uniform white noise can thus be employed to reconstruct a full-rank signal covariance matrix, which enables us to apply the subspace-based DOA estimation methods effectively. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.