2-D DOA Estimation for L-Shaped Sparse Array via Joint Use of Spatial and Temporal Information

In this letter, we propose a joint processing method of spatial and temporal information from L-shaped sparse array (LSA) for two-dimensional (2-D) direction of arrival (DOA) estimation. In particular, either of the two subarrays in LSA can be any type of linear sparse array. With the proposed method, we can construct a virtual planar sparse array first, whose corresponding 2-D difference coarray owns significantly increased degrees of freedom, which can help to enhance the 2-D DOA estimation performance. Thereafter, subspace-based method with 2-D spatial smoothing can be applied to achieve the automatically paired and unambiguous 2-D DOA estimation. Simulation results verify the superiority of the proposed method.