Joint space and time domain processing for DOA estimation

The small degrees of freedom (DOFs) and low SNR of incoming signal lead to direction of arrival (DOA) estimation performance degradation. A spacetime signal processing method for DOA estimation is presented. This method takes advantage of the spatial and temporal statistics of the incoming signal, expanding the dimensions of covariance matrix by increasing the time delay taps which can reduces the spatial correlation between the steering vectors of incoming signals, to improve the robustness of steering beam. The simulation and experiment results by using measured data show the excellent and stable performance of the proposed processing in the case of small degree of freedom, low SNR of incoming signal and small number of snapshots, compared with the conventional method using only spatial statistics.