Quaternion based arrival angles and polarization estimation with a cylindrically shaped conformal array

The estimation of direction-of-arrival (DOA) using sensor array has been widely used in radar, wireless communication systems and navigation, the vector sensor array can make full use of the polarization information of the impinging sources. This paper presents a quaternion-based ESPRIT method to estimate arrival angles and polarization parameters, the corresponding data model of array signal processing is also established by using the quaternion representation. This procedure of estimating the array steering vectors are realized via the eigenvalue decomposition of a quaternion covariance matrix. The quaternion method can better maintain the quaternion vector characteristics, which is very suitable for vector sensor structure. The results of simulation indicate that the performance of the proposed quaternion method has good performance. This method is applicable to the incomplete electromagnetic vector sensor, which extracts two or more (but less than six) components from the six component electromagnetic vector sensor.