An Efficient DOA Estimation Algorithm Based on Diagonal-Symmetric Loading

In order to solve the problem that the subspace-like direction of arrival (DOA) estimation performs poor due to the error of sources number, this paper proposes a new super-resolution DOA estimation algorithm based on the diagonal-symmetric loading (DSL). Specifically, orthogonality principle of the minimum eigenvector of the specific covariance matrix and the source number estimation based on the improved K-means method were adopted to construct the spatial spectrum. Then, by considering the signal-to-interference-to-noise ratio (SINR), the theoretical basis for selecting parameters was given and verified by numerical experiment. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, this paper compared it with the methods of minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) and new signal subspace processing (NSSP). Experimental results prove that the proposed DSL has higher resolution and better estimation accuracy than the MVDR and NSSP.