Improving performance of direction-of-arrival estimation using sparse array in passive radar

Abstract

A method based on sparse array is applied to direction-of-arrival estimation of passive radar in this paper to increase the number of resolvable sources and improve the direction-of-arrival estimation performance for coprime array. The virtual symmetric non-uniform linear array of coprime array based on passive radar signal model is introduced. Considering the impact of direct wave, extensive cancellation algorithm is used to cancel the direct wave, with the conventional MUSIC with spatial smoothing algorithm and virtual aperture filling applied on the sparse array of passive radar; the resolution of target is low in the low signal-noise-ratio. To effectively improve the estimation of the target under the low signal-noise-ratio, a noise subspace reconstruction method is proposed. The proposed direction-of-arrival estimation method can improve the direction-of-arrival estimation performance of passive radar. The simulations are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.