New method for joint elevation and azimuth direction estimation with L-shaped array

This paper addresses the problem of estimating the two-dimensional direction-of-arrival (2D DOA) of multiple narrowband signals impinging on an L-shaped array, which is structured by two uniform linear arrays (ULAs). A computationally efficient method without eigendecomposition is proposed, where the elevation angles are estimated from the cross-correlation matrices between the received data of two ULAs by linear operation, then the estimated elevation angles are used to obtain the azimuth angles by another linear operation, thus the pair-matching of estimated azimuth and elevation angles is avoid. Further the asymptotic mean-square-error (MSE) expressions of the estimation errors are derived, and the effectiveness of proposed method and the theoretical analysis are verified through numerical examples.