Gridless DOA Estimation for Minimum-Redundancy Linear Array in Nonuniform Noise

A gridless direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation method to improve the estimation accuracy and resolution in nonuniform noise is proposed in this paper. This algorithm adopts the structure of minimum-redundancy linear array (MRA) and can be composed of two stages. In the first stage, by minimizing the rank of the covariance matrix of the true signal, the covariance matrix that filters out nonuniform noise is obtained, and then a gridless residual energy constraint scheme is designed to reconstruct the signal covariance matrix of the Hermitian Toeplitz structure. Finally, the unknown DOAs can be determined from the recovered covariance matrix, and the number of sources can be acquired as a byproduct. The proposed algorithm can be regarded as a gridless version method based on sparsity. Simulation results indicate that the proposed method has higher estimation accuracy and resolution compared with existing algorithms.