Direction finding using spatial polarimetric time-frequency distributions

In this paper, we introduce the spatial polarimetric time-frequency distribution (SPTFD) as a platform to process nonstationary array signals with two orthogonal polarization components, such as horizontal and vertical. The use of dual polarization empowers the STFDs and improves the robustness of the respective signal and noise subspaces. With the additional polarimetric information, improved direction finding performance can be achieved. To demonstrate such advantages, the polarimetric time-frequency MUSIC (PTF-MUSIC) method is proposed based on the SPTFD platform and is shown to outperform the MUSIC techniques based on the time-frequency, polarimetric, and conventional methods.