Abstract: Coprime array is a new type of array rising in recent years. It can significantly improve the freedom degree of the array, deal with the direction of arrival (DOA)estimation when the number of sources is greater than the number of array elements, and improve the angle resolution and angle measurement accuracy. According to the characteristics of physical array elements and virtual array elements of coprime array, combined with multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm, a DOA estimation method based on physical array and virtual array for coprime array is proposed in this paper. In the method, the incoherent signal source is taken as the research object, the signal receiving model is established by using coprime array, the DOA estimation method based on physical array is used to deduce its guidance vector according to the position characteristics of coprime array physical array elements, then the echo signal data and signal covariance matrix are calculated according to the guidance vector, and finally MUSIC algorithm is used to estimate DOA. According to the characteristics of virtual array metadata, the DOA estimation method based on virtual array selects continuous virtual array elements to receive data after vectorizing the covariance matrix and removing redundancy, then carries out one-dimensional Toeplitz smooth reconstruction of the new covariance matrix, and finally uses MUSIC algorithm or root MUSIC algorithm for DOA estimation. Compared with the uniform linear array with equal array elements, simulation experiments verify the superiority of DOA estimation performance of coprime array.