Synchronized perturbation elimination and DOA estimation via signal selection mechanism and parallel deep capsule networks in multipath environment

State-of-the-art model-driven Direction-Of-Arrival (DOA) estimation methods for multipath signals face great challenges in practical application because of the dependence on the precise multipath model. In this paper, we introduce a framework, based on deep learning, for synchronizing perturbation auto-elimination with effective DOA estimation in multipath environment. Firstly, a signal selection mechanism is introduced to roughly locate specific signals to spatial subregion via frequency domain filters and compressive sensing-based method. Then, we set the mean of the correlation matrix’s row vectors as the input feature to construct the spatial spectrum by the corresponding single network within the parallel deep capsule networks. The proposed method enhances the generalization capability to untrained scenarios and the adaptability to non-ideal conditions, e.g., lower SNRs, smaller snapshots, unknown reflection coefficients and perturbational steering vectors, which make up for the defects of the previous model-driven methods. Simulations are carried out to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method.