A Novel DOA Estimation for Distributed Sources in an Impulsive Noise Environment

Direction of arrival (DOA) estimation has emerged as a promising technology for many military and civilian applications, such as radio astronomy and wireless communications. However, it remains very challenging to estimate DOA for distributed sources within impulsive noise environments. As is widely known, the utilization of the subspace technology in array signal processing can enable high-resolution DOA estimation. In many instances, most of these algorithms assume that the noise is Gaussian. Considering the impulsive noise environments, the derivative of the error function is derived as the iteratively weighted factor in the objective function of low-rank decomposition. Two iterative algorithms are proposed to compute the signal subspace to implement DOA estimation for coherently distributed sources. To further improve the DOA estimation accuracy and increase the number of estimated sources, the virtual data samples are reconstructed from the extended co-prime array. Simulation results confirm that the two proposed impulsive noise suppression algorithms provide better performance than the existing algorithms. The virtual data samples that are reconstructed from the extended co-prime array can be utilized as the effective inputs for subspace-like algorithms.