2-d Angle Estimation in Beamspace Featuring Multidimensional Multirate Eigenvector Processing

Zoltowski and Kautz recently developed a beamspace domain based 1D angle estimation scheme for uniform linear arrays that allows one to solve for the arrival angles of plane waves via the roots of a small order polynomial and works with any type of front end beamformer. This paper extends their approach to the more general case of 2D angle estimation with a uniform rectangular array (URA) of sensors. The approach is based on the fact that the telescoped beamspace noise eigenvectors exhibit a bandpass characteristic. Therefore, multidimensional multirate processing can be performed to ultimately yield a small dimensional signal subspace. A novel version of ESPRIT can then be applied to eeect closed-form 2D angle estimation and automatically couple the two components of the source directions. Simulations demonstrating the eecacy of the approach are presented .