Computationally Efficient Angle and Polarization Estimation in the Presence of Multipath Propagation Using Dual-Polarization Vector Sensor Array

This paper presents a computationally efficient angle and polarization estimation method for a mixture of uncorrelated and coherent sources using a dual-polarization vector sensor array. The uncorrelated sources are separated from the coherent sources on the basis of the modulus property of eigenvalues. The angles of the uncorrelated sources are estimated by employing rotational invariance and the associated polarization is obtained from the estimate of the uncorrelated array response matrix through elementwise division. For the distinguished coherent sources, two Hankel matrices are constructed from the elements of the estimated coherent array response matrix of each coherent group, from which two rotational-invariant submatrix pairs are extracted for estimating the coherent angles with a high precision. The least-square solution to the coherent polarization equation is derived for estimating the coherent polarization parameters. For each uncorrelated source and coherent group, the proposed method estimates the associated angle and polarization parameters separately, which avoids the need of 3D spectral search. In comparison with the existing methods, the simulation results show that the proposed method yields favorable performance in terms of computational efficiency and estimation accuracy.