Study of ambiguities of linear arrays

The paper is concerned with the ambiguities inherent in the manifold of any uniform or nonuniform linear-array. Ambiguities arise when the manifold repeats itself or when a point on the array manifold can be written as a linear combination of other points. So far only “trivial” ambiguities associated with uniform linear arrays have been studied in the literature. These ambiguities are viewed as appearance of grating lobes when beamforming is used. In the paper the ambiguity problem is extended to any linear geometry and to “non-trivial” ambiguities. Then a new technique is proposed for identifying the ambiguous sets associated with a given geometry