Noncircular coherent signal direction of arrival estimation for coprime array: A subspace‐based interpolation approach

Abstract To address the array aperture loss caused by mainstream direction of arrival (DOA) estimation algorithms for coherent signals using matrix interpolation techniques, a non‐circular (NC) coherent signal direction‐finding method that fully utilises covariance matrix information is proposed. The received data is firstly extended by leveraging its NC properties. Then, eigenvalue decomposition is performed on the covariance matrix to extract the signal subspace, which is mapped to a uniform linear array signal subspace via a mapping matrix. The first row of the covariance matrix corresponding to the signal subspace is employed to construct a Toeplitz matrix, and nuclear norm minimisation method is applied to recover the missing information. Finally, to avoid extra NC phase searching, the reduced‐dimension method is applied to obtain the estimation results. Performance analysis and simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves improvements in computational complexity, source estimation capability, and estimation accuracy.