Time-delay direction finding based on canonical correlation analysis [electronic warfare applications]

Direction finding is an important component of electronic warfare (EW) systems. Direction finding precision may directly affect signal sorting, recognition, location, and jamming decisions, etc. Thus, it is an urgent task to improve direction finding precision. To solve the problems of time-delay direction finding´s sensitivity to interference, this paper proposes a novel technique based on canonical correlation analysis (CCA) to improve time-delay direction finding performance and completely analyzes the algorithm. The implementation of this time-delay direction finding method is simple and the computational complexity is low. The precision of direction finding by the new method is much better than that by the conventional method. Simulations show that applying CCA to time-delay direction finding is efficient and feasible.