Remarks on the Spatial Smoothing Step in Coarray MUSIC

Sparse arrays such as nested and coprime arrays use a technique called spatial smoothing in order to successfully perform MUSIC in the difference-coarray domain. In this paper it is shown that the spatial smoothing step is not necessary in the sense that the effect achieved by that step can be obtained more directly. In particular, with R̃_ss denoting the spatial smoothed matrix with finite snapshots, it is shown here that the noise eigenspace of this matrix can be directly obtained from another matrix R̃ which is much easier to compute from data.