Coupled C-Esprit-Based Azimuth and Elevation Angle Estimation With Minimum Variance

Abstract

This paper presents a method for conjugate estimation of azimuth and elevation angles based on the minimum variance C-ESPRIT method. The conjugate estimation method with minimum variance is a modification of the robust method based on the ESPRIT method with minimum variance and differs from it in that it does not require prior matching of signal duplicates. When modeling the signal acquisition from a unmanned aerial vehicle and processing it with the ESPRIT method, the data were distorted. Several signals were not displayed and noise appeared, which prevented the estimation of the signal arrival direction. The paper presents an efficient algorithm that can estimate the direction of arrival based on uncorrelated and one-dimensional signals. The method of conjugate estimation with minimum variance, when compared to the method of conjugate estimation without minimum variance, has been shown to improve the signal by a factor of 10. This improvement in signal quality allows one to conclude that the method is highly efficient. The C-ESPRIT-based minimum variance conjugate azimuth and location angle estimation method uses a robust minimum variance method with a conjugate rotation matrix to process a second subarray of data. An important aspect of the method is that it uses information from all array elements without grouping them and without computing the mean of the covariance matrices.