Performance Study of High-Resolution Beam Domain DOA Estimation Methods

The traditional element-domain adaptive beamforming algorithms suffer from high computational complexity and strong data dependency, but beamspace dimensionality reduction processing can effectively reduce the computational load while enhancing out-of-sector interference suppression capability. This article studies the minimum variance distortionless response method and the multiple signal classification method in both element domain and beam domain. Simulation and real underwater data processing results show that the beam-domain method can significantly reduce the computational complexity of the algorithm, lower the requirement for data snapshot count, improve the algorithm's tolerance for data, and achieve positioning performance comparable to or even better than that in the element domain.