Spatial polarimetric time-frequency distributions for direction-of-arrival estimations

Time-frequency distributions (TFDs) are traditionally applied to a single antenna receiver with a single polarization. Recently, spatial time-frequency distributions (STFDs) have been developed for receivers with multiple single-polarized antennas and successfully applied for direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation of nonstationary signals. In this paper, we consider dual-polarized antenna arrays and extend the STFD to utilize the source polarization properties. The spatial polarimetric time-frequency distributions (SPTFDs) are introduced as a platform for processing polarized nonstationary signals, which are received by an array of dual-polarized double-feed antennas. This paper deals with narrow-band far-field point sources that lie in the plane of the receiver array. The source signals are decomposed into two orthogonal polarization components, such as vertical and horizontal. The ability to incorporate signal polarization empowers the STFDs with an additional degree of freedom, leading to improved signal and noise subspace estimates for direction finding. The polarimetric time-frequency MUSIC (PTF-MUSIC) method for DOA estimation based on the SPTFD platform is developed and shown to outperform the time-frequency, polarimetric, and conventional MUSIC techniques, when applied separately.