Fast and accurate wideband sparse spatial spectrum estimation in an underwater strong interference environment

Wideband sparse spatial spectrum estimation is an important direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation method that can obtain a high resolution with few snapshots and a low signal-to-noise ratio. However, in an underwater strong interference environment, the accuracy of DOA estimation may be seriously affected, and even the weak targets could be completely masked. In this paper, we propose a fast matrix filter design method based on truncated nuclear norm regularization to attenuate strong interferences while passing weak targets. The matrix filter operator and the exact covariance matrix after filtering can be obtained simultaneously by solving a convex optimization problem that contains the output power term and non-Toeplitz error propagation control term. Then the modified sparse spectrum fitting algorithm based on the matrix filter is used to estimate spatial spectrum over closely spaced wideband signals. Compared with existing methods, the proposed method achieves higher DOA estimation accuracy and lower computational time for matrix filter design. Meanwhile, the estimation accuracy of the proposed method is verified with the experimental results.