Spatial-temporal polarization smoothing for joint frequency, 2-D DOA, and polarization estimation of coherent sources with linear electromagnetic vector sensors array

This paper studies the issue of joint estimation of frequency, two-dimensional (2-D) Direction Of Arrival (DOA) and polarization of coherent sources using a uniform linear electromagnetic vector sensors array, and a Spatial-Temporal Polarization Smoothing Algorithm (STPSA) is proposed. The STPSA is used to decorrelate the source coherency and eliminate the effect of noise with the two time-delayed sets of data collected from different subarrays and different sensor components of vector sensors, and then the propagator method is applied to estimate the source' frequency, 2-D DOA and polarization. Comparing with the existing estimate methods, the proposed method requires neither the eigen-decomposition into signal/noise subspaces nor the iteratively searching, hence, has lower computational load. Furthermore, the proposed method can offer the improved estimation performance by increasing the intervector sensor spacing much farther apart than a half wavelength to extend aperture without any additional disambiguation processing. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.