Localisation of mixed near‐field and far‐field sources using the largest aperture sparse linear array
Ali Akbar Ebrahimi, Hamid Reza Abutalebi, Mahmood Karimi · IET Signal Processing · 2017
In some applications, the signals received by an array are a mixture of signals emitted by both far‐field and near‐field sources. This study develops a new cumulant‐based multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm for source localisation using a new structural sparse array for scenarios where both far‐field and near‐field sources coexist. The key feature of this algorithm is that it utilises fourth‐order cumulants to compute the virtual covariance matrix and constructs a new special cumulant matrix to acquire the largest number of virtual sensors and the largest array aperture for a given number of sensors. The authors provide a geometric proof to justify the utilisation of the proposed sparse linear array and compute the effective aperture of the array. The proposed algorithm increases resolution ability, direction of arrival (DOA) and range estimation accuracy, and the number of sources to be localised. Moreover, the new method has the main advantage that it does not use the information of all sensors; so that it provides somewhat low computational complexity while it uses many actual and virtual sensors. Monte Carlo simulations are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.