Coherent source location using autocorrelation matrix smoothing with transmit/receive arrays

When arrays of narrowband transmitting and receiving elements are used to locate the directions of remote targets, the reflections from the targets are often spatially coherent. Angle of arrival (AOA) estimation techniques such as MUSIC are not effective in this situation. A spatial smoothing operation can be performed on the sum coarray of the transmit/receive system in order to decorrelate the coherent reflections, and two previously-proposed methods are of this type. In the present paper, a more general decorrelation method called autocorrelation matrix smoothing is applied to transmit/receive arrays