Covariance matrix denoising based direction of arrive estimation for spherical array with atomic norm minimization

A covariance matrix denoising based Direction-of-arrive (DOA) estimation approach for spherical array is developed in this paper. Firstly, based on the spherical phase mode transformation, a spherical harmonic (SH) domain covariance matrix model of the spherical array is presented as multiple measurement vectors, where the atomic norm minimization approach is extended to SH domain and is applied for covariance matrix denoising. Then the spherical ESPRIT method is used to DOA estimation. Unlike the conventional approaches, the proposed method not only requires no prior knowledge of the noise statistic property, but also has the capability of dealing with the coherent signals. Simulations show the out performance of out method compared with the conventional ones.