An Effective Technique for Enhancing Direction Finding Performance of Virtual Arrays

Abstract

The array interpolation technology that is used to establish a virtual array from a real antenna array is widely used in direction finding. The traditional interpolation transformation technology causes significant bias in the directional-of-arrival (DOA) estimation due to its transform errors. In this paper, we proposed a modified interpolation method that significantly reduces bias in the DOA estimation of a virtual antenna array and improves the resolution capability. Using the projection concept, this paper projects the transformation matrix into the real array data covariance matrix; the operation not only enhances the signal subspace but also improves the orthogonality between the signal and noise subspace. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The proposed method can achieve better DOA estimation accuracy of virtual arrays and has a high resolution performance compared to the traditional interpolation method.