Adaptive estimation of the polarization of a signal

The polarized component of a partially polarized wave may be suppressed by synthesizing the receiving antenna polarization appropriately. We evaluate the performance of a polarimetric signal suppression (or enhancement) strategy in which the desired polarization of the receiving antenna is adaptively estimated using a finite number of secondary vectors. The probability density function of the Stokes vector estimated from a set of secondary vectors is obtained for the case where the wave components along two orthogonal polarizations of each secondary vector ore modeled as complex, zero-mean, jointly Gaussian random variables. The density function is used to obtain confidence limits for the estimated direction of the Stokes vector and some implications to the problem of adaptive signal suppression (or enhancement) are indicated.<>