Direction finding of coherent sources with nonlinear arrays (Q1908841)

Direction finding for coherent sources distributed in nonlinear arrays is a basic problem in radar, sonar, seismology and other areas. Most of the approaches are devoted to the case when the narrow band signals are incoherent. When these signals are stemming from a multipath propagation channel, the hypothesis of incoherency is no longer valid. Also, a difficulty arises from the fact that the array is not linear. The idea of the proposed method consists in using the so-called focusing matrix which estimates the outputs of a virtual uniform array from the outputs of the real array with an arbitrary geometry. The method requires to have an initial estimate of the direction of arrival of the source. Computer simulations for some cases show clearly the advantages of the proposed methods over previously existing ones.