Rectification of cross spectral matrices for arrays of arbitrary geometry

In high resolution methods applied to Uniform Linear Arrays (ULA), the pre-processing that consists in forcing the estimated Cross Spectral Matrix (CSM) to be Toeplitz by averaging its elements along its diagonals is known to increase drastically the resolving power: that is why it is always done in practise. However, this approach is limited to linear arrays because of the required Toeplitz structure for the CSM. This paper generalizes this technique to arrays of arbitrary geometry: the developed method is referred to as rectification. It proceeds by searching first for a vector subspace of hermitian matrices that contains the manifold generated by the CSM’s when the Angle Of Arrival varies: this preliminary step is performed only one time for a given array geometry. Next, rectification of estimated CSM’s is achieved by projecting them onto this subspace, resulting in denoising and increased resolving power of source localization methods at a very low computational cost. As a by product, the storage requirements for the CSM’s are greatly reduced.