2-D direction-of-arrival estimation of coherent signals using cross-correlation matrix

In this paper, we present a new two-dimensional (2-D) direction-of-arrival (DOA) angle estimation method for coherent or highly correlated narrowband signals using L-shape arrays. The proposed method decorrelates the coherent incident signals and reconstructs the signal subspace using the cross-correlation matrix. Then the shift invariance property of the array geometry is employed to estimate the azimuth and elevation angles. This approach enables the 2-D DOA estimation without the use of peak search and is robust to noise. Moreover, we extend the proposed forward method to the forward/backward one. Experimental results demonstrate that satisfactory performances of the proposed methods are obtained for correlated signals in the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) situations and with small number of snapshots.