Spectral Domain Sparse Representation for DOA Estimation of Signals with Large Dynamic Range

Recently, we proposed a Spectral Domain Sparse Representation (SDSR) approach for the direction-of-arrival estimation of signals incident to an antenna array. In the approach, sparse representation is applied to the conventional Bartlett spectra obtained from snapshots of the signals received by the antenna array to increase the direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation resolution and accuracy. The conventional Bartlett spectra has limited dynamic range, meaning that one may not be able to identify the presence of weak signals in the presence of strong signals. This is because, in the conventional Bartlett spectra, uniform weighting (window) is applied to signals received by various antenna elements. Apodization can be used in the generation of Bartlett spectra to increase the dynamic range of the spectra. In Apodization, more than one window function is used to generate different portions of the spectra. In this paper, we extend the SDSR approach to include Bartlett spectra obtained with Apodization and to evaluate the performance of the extended SDSR approach. We compare its performance with a two-step SDSR approach and with an approach where Bartlett spectra is obtained using a low sidelobe window function. We show that an Apodization Bartlett-based SDSR approach leads to better performance with just single-step processing