The strong electromagnetic mutual coupling effect of a compact uniform circular array (UCA) will severely degrade the performance of beamforming (BF) or direction-of-arrival (DoA) estimation.Based on the special circular symmetry of a UCA

a new efficient and robust calibration method is proposed for the mutual coupling effect.Only one single signal source and one trial are required to complete the calibration

and the direction of the signal source does not need to be calibrated beforehand.First in discrete Fourier transform (DFT) space

the mutual coupling matrix (MCM) is transformed to be a centrosymmetric vector.Then in a prior 2D spatial angular domain

limited angle searching is carried out to get the estimate of the parameters according to a novel objection function based on the symmetry.Comparative simulations verify the effectiveness and robustness of the new algorithm and at the same time reveal that method based on rank reduction (RARE) lacks robustness

and thus a simple and efficient approach for mutual coupling calibration is provided when UCA is applied in radar

mobile communication system etc.