Conjugate Augmented Decoupled 3-D Parameters Estimation Method for Near-Field Sources

A near-field source localization method is proposed for 2-D direction-of-arrival (DOA) and range estimation based on a symmetrical cross array. It first employs the conjugate symmetry property of signal autocorrelation for different time delays to construct a conjugate augmented spatial–temporal cross-correlation matrix, then the extended steering vector is decoupled to avoid the usual multidimensional search based on the properties of the Khatri–Rao product, and finally three 1-D MUSIC-type searches are employed to obtain the results. The proposed method can realize automatic pairing of multiple parameters associated with each source and it also works in the underdetermined case. Furthermore, the stochastic Cramer–Rao lower bound with different time delays is derived. Compared with two existing methods, simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method provides satisfactory estimation performance for both the DOA and range parameters at low signal-to-noise ratio and with a small number of snapshots.