Abstract:

A 2-dimensional(2-D) interferometric-like amplitude and phase estimator (APES) algorithm is proposed for blind direction of arrival (DOA) estimation of distributed coherent arrays, which combines the antenna configurations of an interfermetric radar and 2-D DOA estimation algorithms. The number of targets and their coarse direction cosine estimation are obtained from 2-D interferometric-like APES spatial spectral and model order selection criterion. The high accuracy direction cosine estimation is derived from phase center shift between subarrays. A dual algorithm is used to resolve the ambiguity in 2-D DOA estimation resulted from the distributed coherent arrays. Then the low variance and unambiguous 2-D DOA estimation are achieved. Simulation results demonstrate the high accuracy DOA estimation of distributed coherent arrays and the effectiveness of the proposed method, and also demonstrate that a baseline ambiguity threshold exists in the distributed coherent arrays.