Electronics and Electrical Engineering and Control

PHD-based DOA tracking via Taylor compensation and projection cancellation

  • Jinke CAO ,
  • Xiaofei ZHANG ,
  • Qihui WU ,
  • De BEN
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  • 1.College of Electronic and Information Engineering,Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics,Nanjing 211106,China
    2.Key Laboratory of Dynamic Cognitive System of Electromagnetic Spectrum Space,Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics,Nanjing 211106,China

Received date: 2025-12-04

  Revised date: 2025-12-16

  Accepted date: 2026-01-13

  Online published: 2026-02-03

Supported by

National Natural Science Foundation of China(62371225);Postgraduate Research & Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province(KYCX25_0590)

Abstract

In multi-domain collaborative sensing and target situation awareness tasks, traditional high-accuracy Direction-of-Arrival (DOA) estimation methods typically rely on a known and fixed number of sources. However, during continuous tracking, the number of targets may vary over time, causing fixed-source-number models to become invalid. Meanwhile, in passive array sensing, multi-target signals often appear in a superimposed form, making it difficult to construct effective single-target likelihood functions and thus limiting the applicability of Random Finite Set (RFS)-based filters in DOA tracking. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a continuous DOA tracking method based on a Taylor-expanded projection-cancellation model. By performing a Taylor expansion of the steering vector around the predicted angle, an extended signal subspace is constructed, and interference from other sources is eliminated using sequential projection operators, resulting in a single-source-equivalent pseudo-spectrum. This enables robust decomposition of multi-source superimposed observations and reliable construction of single-target likelihoods. Furthermore, based on the energy characteristics of the projection-cancellation spectrum and the particle-weight distribution, a birth-death detection mechanism is introduced, which adaptively adjusts the likelihood dimension in the PHD filter without requiring prior source-number estimation. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior DOA tracking performance compared with conventional approaches, particularly under low SNR conditions and dynamically varying source scenarios.

Cite this article

Jinke CAO , Xiaofei ZHANG , Qihui WU , De BEN . PHD-based DOA tracking via Taylor compensation and projection cancellation[J]. ACTA AERONAUTICAET ASTRONAUTICA SINICA, 2026 , 47(16) : 333190 -333190 . DOI: 10.7527/S1000-6893.2026.33190

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