Closed-form 2-D angle estimation with rectangular arrays in element space or beamspace via unitary ESPRIT

The UCA-ESPRIT is a closed-form algorithm developed for use in conjunction with a uniform circular array (UCA) that provides automatically paired source azimuth and elevation angle estimates. The 2-D unitary ESPRIT is presented as an algorithm providing the same capabilities for a uniform rectangular array (URA). In the final stage of the algorithm, the real and imaginary parts of the ith eigenvalue of a matrix are one-to-one related to the respective direction cosines of the ith source relative to the two major array axes. The 2-D unitary ESPRIT offers a number of advantages over other proposed ESPRIT based closed-form 2-D angle estimation techniques. First, except for the final eigenvalue decomposition of a dimension equal to the number of sources, it is efficiently formulated in terms of real-valued computation throughout. Second, it is amenable to efficient beamspace implementations that are presented. Third, it is applicable to array configurations that do not exhibit identical subarrays, e.g., two orthogonal linear arrays. Finally, the 2-D unitary ESPRIT easily handles sources having one member of the spatial frequency coordinate pair in common. Simulation results are presented verifying the efficacy of the method.