Abstract
In this paper, we present a performance improvement method for the direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation algorithm of the narrowband signals incident on a uniform circular array. It is very important to estimate the covariance matrix effectively because the performance of DOA algorithm mainly depends on the exactness of the sampel coveriance matrix which is computed from the received samples of signals. In case of uniform circular array with the even number sensors, the structure of the arrray has a useful geometrical property. Therefore we present the method which can estimate covariance matrix more effectively using this property. The simulation results are shown to demonstrate the superior perfodrmance obtained by the proposed covariance matrix estimation method relative to that of the conventional estimation method.