Spatial difference smoothing for DOA estimation of coherent signals

A new method is proposed for direction-of-arrival estimation of coherent signals in the presence of correlated noise fields. The method comprises two steps: a first step for discriminating incoherent signals, and a second step for resolving correlated and coherent signals using spatial difference smoothing. It can eliminate spatially correlated noise and resolve more signals compared with the existing methods. The theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed method is effective.