Source Localization Using Distributed Electromagnetic Vector Sensors

Abstract

Electromagnetic vector sensor (EVS) array has drawn extensive attention in the past decades, since it offers two‐dimensional direction‐of‐arrival (2D‐DOA) estimation and additional polarization information of the incoming source. Most of the existing works concerning EVS array are focused on parameter estimation with special array architecture, e.g., uniform manifold and sparse arrays. In this paper, we consider a more general scenario that EVS array is distributed in an arbitrary geometry, and a novel estimator is proposed. Firstly, the covariance tensor model is established, which can make full use of the multidimensional structure of the array measurement. Then, the higher‐order singular value decomposition (HOSVD) is adopted to obtain a more accurate signal subspace. Thereafter, a novel rotation invariant relation is exploited to construct a normalized Poynting vector, and the vector cross‐product technique is utilized to estimate the 2D‐DOA. Based on the previous obtained 2D‐DOA, the polarization parameter can be easily achieved via the least squares method. The proposed method is suitable for EVS array with arbitrary geometry, and it is insensitive to the spatially colored noise. Therefore, it is more flexible than the state‐of‐the‐art algorithms. Finally, numerical simulations are carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed estimator.