Direct Position Determination of Coherent Sources Based on Moving Smoothing of Electronic Reconnaissance Arrays

Aiming at the requirements of coherent radiation source location, a direct position determination method of coherent sources based on distributed electronic reconnaissance arrays is proposed in this paper. Based on the phase center movement characteristics caused by the motion of reconnaissance arrays, the proposed method combines the idea of spatial smoothing to perform spatial smoothing on the covariance matrices of data at different instants after each array motion. Coherent sources are decoupled on each individual array, then the positions of coherent sources are obtained by using spatial spectrum high-resolution direct position determination technique. Traditional spatial smoothing algorithms have limitations on array configurations, and are only applicable to uniform linear arrays or circular arrays, resulting in losses of array aperture lengths and decreases in angle estimation performances. Different from traditional spatial smoothing algorithms, the proposed method exploits the movement characteristics of the entire array for smoothing without losing the array aperture size. The proposed method is applicable to any array manifold structure, and its effectiveness on angle estimation and position estimation of coherent radiation sources has been verified by computer simulation.