Toeplitz-Enhanced Array Covariance Processing for DOA Estimation Under Low SNR and Limited Snapshots

Multiple-source DOA (Direction of Arrival) estimation is vital for array processing, radar, and integrated sensing and communications, yet classical subspace methods degrade under low signal-to-noise ratios and snapshot-starved conditions due to inaccurate sample covariance matrices. To address this, we propose a Toeplitz-enhanced neural network (TENN-DOA) for DOA estimation, a hybrid physics-informed framework for uniform linear arrays that combines the array signal processing prior with a lightweight learning-based regressor. The front end explicitly enforces the Hermitian–Toeplitz structure and fuses the projected matrix with the sample covariance via an analytically derived optimal shrinkage coefficient, yielding a robust covariance estimate. This enhanced representation is mapped onto an overcomplete angular dictionary, producing a feature sequence structurally coupled with the array manifold. A pooling-free one-dimensional convolutional neural network with decreasing kernel sizes starts with large kernels to capture the broad spectral envelope from grid mismatch, and then regresses to a pseudo spatial spectrum under multi-hot supervision for grid-point estimates. The Monte Carlo simulation results show that under the conditions of low signal-to-noise ratio, limited snapshots and the simulated ideal uniform linear array scenario, TENN-DOA achieves a higher resolution probability and lower root mean square error compared with MUSIC, TLS-ESPRIT and the deep learning-based baseline algorithm DA-MUSIC.