Thinned coprime array for second-order difference co-array generation with reduced mutual coupling

In this work, we present a new coprime array structure termed thinned coprime array (TCA), which exploits the redundancy in the structure of existing coprime array and achieves the same virtual aperture and degrees of freedom (DOFs) as the conventional coprime array with much fewer number of sensors. In comparison to other sparse arrays, thinned coprime arrays possess more unique lags (total number of difference co-arrays) than the nested arrays, while the number of consecutive lags (connected co-arrays) generated is close to 75 percent of the consecutive lags of the nested arrays with hole-free co-arrays. The resulting structure is much sparser and the number of sensor pairs with small separation is significantly reduced. Theoretical properties and proofs are provided and simulations are presented to demonstrate its robustness against heavy levels of mutual coupling using compressive sensing (CS) based direction of arrival (DOA) estimation as well as certain additional desirable characteristics.