A Singular Value Thresholding Based Matrix Completion Method for DOA Estimation in Nonuniform Noise

Usually, the problem of direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation is performed based on the assumption of uniform noise. In many applications, however, the noise across the array may be nonuniform. In this situation, the performance of DOA estimators may be deteriorated greatly if the non-uniformity of noise is ignored. To tackle this problem, we consider the problem of DOA estimation in the presence of nonuniform noise by leveraging a singular value thresholding (SVT) based matrix completion method. Different from that the traditional SVT method apply fixed threshold, to improve the performance, the proposed method can obtain a more suitable threshold based on careful estimation of the signal-to-noise ratio(SNR) levels. Specifically, we firstly employ an SVT-based matrix completion method to estimate the noise-free covariance matrix. On this basis, the signal and noise subspaces are obtained from the eigendecomposition of the noise-free covariance matrix. Finally, traditional subspace-based DOA estimation approaches can be directly applied to determine the DOAs. Numerical simulations are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.