Abstract: A new method based on fourth-order cumulant and propagator method for the joint estimation of the range and DOA of spatial near-field sources is presented. The fourth-order cumulant matrix is constructed using the received uniform linear array data, the received signal noise subspace is estimated by propagator method; the range and DOA of spatial near-field sources are gotten through the spectrum peak search method after the MUSIC spectrum function construction. Compared with the traditional MUSIC algorithm, the presented algorithm with the propagator method directly estimates the least squares solution of the noise subspace, rather than conventional orthogonal solution of singular value decomposition algorithm. Although the estimation performance of the presented alogorithm is slightly inferior to the traditional singular value decomposition algorithm, it has lower computational complexity. The simulation results show the proposed method is effective.

Key words: near-field source, four-order cumulant, DOA estimate, range estimate, propagator method