Beam-doppler unitary ESPRIT for multitarget DOA estimation

High-resolution direction of arrival (DOA) estimation is a critical issue for mainbeam multitarget tracking in ground-based or airborne early warning radar system. A beam-Doppler unitary ESPRIT (BD-UESPRIT) algorithm is proposed to deal with this problem. Firstly, multiple snapshots without spatial aperture loss are obtained by using the technique of time-smoothing. Then the conjugate centrosymmetric discrete Fourier transform (DFT) matrix is used to transform the extracted data into beam-Doppler domain. Finally, the rotational invariance property of the space-time beam is exploited to estimate DOA of the target. The DOA estimation accuracy is improved greatly because the proposed algorithm takes full advantage of temporal information of the signal. Furthermore, the computational complexity of the presented algorithm is reduced dramatically, because the degree of freedom after beam transformation is very small and most of the operations are implemented in real-number domain. Numerical examples are given to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.