Multi-DOA estimation based on the KR image tensor and improved estimation network

Abstract

Abstract Deep neural networks have shown great performance for direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation problem, but it is necessary to design some suitable networks to solve the multi-DOA estimation problem. In this paper, we use Khatri–Rao product to increase the degree of freedom of antenna array and obtain the image tensor of covariance matrix, then we propose an improved estimation network to process the tensor. We use the curriculum learning scheme and partial label strategy to develop a CurriculumNet training scheme. The training/validation results shows that the proposed training scheme can increase the generalization of the estimation network and improve the accuracy of network around $$10\%$$ 10 % . The estimation performance of the proposed network shows high-resolution results, which can distinguish two adjacent signals with angle difference of $$3^\circ $$ 3 ∘ . Moreover, the proposed estimation network has root mean square estimation error lower than $$1^\circ $$ 1 ∘ when signal noise ratio equals $$-\,10\,{\mathrm {dB}}$$ - 10 dB and can estimate DOAs precisely by only 8 snapshots, which performs much better than prior deep neural network based estimation methods and can estimate multi-DOA results under hostile estimation environments.