A novel coherent column replacement method in compressed sensing for DOA estimation

In this paper, a novel method named as coherent column replacement method is proposed to reduce the coherence of a partially deterministic sensing matrix, which is comprised of highly coherent columns and random Gaussian columns. The proposed method is to replace the highly coherent columns with random Gaussian columns to obtain a new sensing matrix. The measurement vector is changed accordingly. It is proved that the original sparse signal could be reconstructed well from the newly changed measurement vector based on the new sensing matrix with large probability. This method is then extended to more practical condition when highly coherent columns and incoherent columns are considered, e.g. the direction of arrival (DOA) estimation problem in phased array radar system using compressed sensing. Numerical simulations show that the proposed method succeeds in identifying multiple targets in a sparse radar scene, where the compressed sensing method based on the original sensing matrix fails. The proposed method also obtains more precise estimation of DOA using one snapshot compared with the traditional estimation methods such as Capon, APES and GLRT based on hundreds of snapshots.