Partial spectral search‐based DOA estimation method for co‐prime linear arrays

A computationally efficient method for direction‐of‐arrival (DOA) estimation is proposed for co‐prime linear arrays. For each DOA, multiple peaks are generated in the spatial spectrum for each subarray, which are proven to be uniformly distributed in the transformed domain. By searching over a limited sector to find an arbitrary peak, all the others can be recovered without a spectral search. Finally, the DOAs can be uniquely estimated by finding the common peaks of the two decomposed subarrays. The proposed method provides increased estimation accuracy with a substantially reduced computational burden. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.