Efficient 2D-DOA Estimation Based on Triple Attention Mechanism for L-Shaped Array

Abstract

Accurate direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation is crucial to a variety of applications, including wireless communications, radar systems, and sensor arrays. In this work, we propose a novel deep convolutional neural network (DCN) called TADCN for 2D-DOA estimation using an L-shaped array. The network achieves high estimation performance through a triple attention mechanism (TAM). Specifically, the new architecture enables the network to capture the relationships across the channel, height, and width dimensions of the signal sample features, thereby enhancing the feature extraction capability and improving the resulting spatial spectrum. To this end, the spatial spectrum is processed by the proposed spectrum analyzer to yield high-precision DOA estimation results. An automatic angle matching method based on TADCN is employed for estimating the pairing between the estimated azimuth and elevation DOA sets. Furthermore, the overall efficiency is enhanced through the parallel processing of the angle estimation and matching networks. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms traditional methods and deep learning-based approaches for various noise levels and snapshots while maintaining better estimation performance even in the presence of correlated signal sources.