Improved unitary root-MUSIC for DOA estimation based on pseudo-noise resampling

A novel pseudo-noise resampling (PR) based unitary root-MUSIC algorithm for direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation is derived in this letter. Our solution is able to eliminate the abnormal DOA estimator called outlier and obtain an approximate outlier-free performance in the unitary root-MUSIC algorithm. In particular, we utilize a hypothesis test to detect the outlier. Meanwhile, a PR process is applied to form a DOA estimator bank and a corresponding root estimator bank. We propose a distance detection strategy which exploits the information contained in the estimated root estimator to help determine the final DOA estimates when all the DOA estimators fail to pass the reliability test. Furthermore, the proposed method is realized in terms of real-valued computations, leading to an efficient implementation. Simulations show that the improved MUSIC scheme can significantly improve the DOA resolution at low signal-to-noise ratios and small samples.