Maximum Eigenvalue Method for Direction-Finding in Coherent Situation

In this paper, a new direction of arrival (DOA) estimation method is proposed for uniform linear array when both uncorrelated and coherent sources are present. After the first eigen decomposition of the received data covariance matrix, the eigenvector corresponding to the maximum eigenvalue is used to construct a new matrix, by the second eigen decomposition of which, the DOAs of the uncorrelated and coherent sources are estimated simultaneously, without exploiting the famous spatial smoothing-like algorithms. Comparing with the spatial smoothing-like methods, the proposed method can detect much more coherent sources without causing the deficiency of array aperture. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and performance of the proposed approach.