SDOAnet: An Efficient Deep Learning-Based DOA Estimation Network for Imperfect Array

Direction of arrival (DOA) estimation is a fundamental problem in both conventional radar and wireless communication applications and emerging integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems. Due to many imperfect factors in the low-cost systems, including the antenna position perturbations, the inconsistent gains/phases, the mutual coupling effect, the nonlinear amplifier effect, etc., the performance of the DOA estimation often degrades significantly. To characterize the realistic array more accurately, a novel deep learning (DL)-based DOA estimation method named super-resolution DOA network (SDOAnet) is proposed in this paper. Different from the existing DL-based DOA methods, our proposed SDOAnet employs the sampled received signals, instead of the covariance matrices of the received signals, as the input of the convolution layers for extracting data features. Moreover, the output of SDOAnet is a vector that is independent of the DOA of targets but can be used to estimate their spatial spectrum. As a result, the same training network can be applied with any number of targets, which significantly reduce the implementation complexity. At last, the convergence speed of our SDOAnet with a low-dimension network structure is much faster than existing DL-based methods. Simulation results show that the proposed SDOAnet outperforms the existing DOA estimation methods with the effect of the imperfect array. The code about the SDOAnet is available online https://github.com/chenpengseu/SDOAnet.git.