The invention discloses a non-uniform array design and
direction of arrival (DOA)
estimation method and mainly aims at solving the problems that arrangement is inflexible and
computation complexity isrelatively high in the prior art. A realization process of the method comprises the following steps: according to maximum freedom degree of a nested array, determining head and
tail position coefficients of a non-uniform array; calculating position coefficients of all the
virtual array element positions meeting the non-uniform array and contained in a differential synthetic matrix; according to the position coefficients, finally obtaining positions of array elements of the non-uniform array; according to received data, calculating a
data covariance matrix and vectorizing, so that received data r of a virtual differential synthetic array is obtained; performing redundancy
elimination on the r and sorting to obtain received data of a
virtual array, and then obtaining a non-
singular matrix vof the
virtual array; constructing a linear operator, and obtaining a
signal subspace by estimating the linear operator; and constructing a selection matrix to obtain a
rotation matrix, and finally estimating a
direction of arrival by virtue of the
rotation matrix. The method disclosed by the invention has the advantages that array configuration is flexible, characteristic
decomposition does notneed to be performed on the
data covariance matrix and spectral peak search does not need to be performed on the whole airspace angle under the same conditions.