A self-calibration technique for direction estimation with diversely polarized arrays

A self-calibration algorithm is presented for direction finding using diversely polarized arrays in the presence of sensor gain and phase uncertainties. The method jointly estimates the directions of arrival of all the sources as well as the gain and phase of each sensor in the array. The technique is based on iterating between direction estimation and gain/phase estimation. The first is accomplished by the the MUSIC algorithm and the latter by the calculation of the smallest eigenvalue of a certain matrix. A key feature of this approach is that the computation of the gain/phase coefficients does not involve search and is computationally efficient. The performance of the algorithm is illustrated by numerical examples. The Cramer-Rao bound for the joint estimation problem is derived.