Real-Valued Direct Position Determination of Quasi-Stationary Signals for Nested Arrays: Khatri–Rao Subspace and Unitary Transformation

The features of quasi-stationary signals (QSS) are considered to be in a direct position determination (DPD) framework, and a real-valued DPD algorithm of QSS for nested arrays is proposed. By stacking the vectorization form of the signal’s covariance for different frames and further eliminating noise, a new noise-eliminated received signal matrix is obtained first. Then, the combination of the Khatri–Rao subspace method and subspace data fusion method was performed to form the cost function. High complexity can be reduced by matrix reconstruction, including the modification of the dimension-reduced matrix and unitary transformation. Ultimately, the advantage of lower complexity, compared with the previous algorithm, is verified by complexity analysis, and the superiority over the existing algorithms, in terms of the maximum number of identifiable sources, estimation accuracy, and resolution, are corroborated by some simulation results.