Two-dimensional direction of arrival estimation for coprime planar arrays via a computationally efficient one-dimensional partial spectral search approach

The authors investigate the problem of two-dimensional (2D) direction of arrival (DOA) estimation of multiple signals for coprime planar arrays (CPAs) in this study and they propose a computationally efficient 1D partial spectral search approach based on multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm. The conventional 2D MUSIC algorithm for CPAs has a great DOA estimation performance, but suffers from a tremendously expensive computational complexity due to the 2D spectral search. To this end, the proposed approach first decreases the dimension of the spectrum function to one dimension and then utilises the linear relationship between the true and ambiguous DOA estimates to form a 1D partial spectral search over a small sector. Finally, the true DOA estimates can be achieved based on the coprime property. The proposed approach can have an impressively good DOA estimation performance, but with a low computational cost. Simulation results validate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach.