An improved sparse representation method for direction-of-arrival estimation in the presence of unknown mutual coupling

Mutual coupling is a practical problem in array signal processing, which seriously degrades the performance of most high-resolution array processing methods. In this paper, an improved sparse representation method is proposed for direction-of-arrival estimation in the presence of unknown mutual coupling. By making use of the special structure of mutual coupling matrix for uniform linear array, the mutual coupling effect is eliminated completely. Compared to the state-of-the-art sparsity-based methods, the proposed method shows higher resolution, lower variance and lower computational cost. Simulation results are presented to verify the performance of the proposed method.