Regularized Estimation of Kronecker-Structured Covariance Matrix With Applications to Polarization Space-Time Adaptive Processing
Lei Xie, Zishu He, Jun Tong, Tianle Liu, Jun Li, Jiangtao Xi · arXiv (Cornell University) · 2021
This paper investigates regularized estimation of Kronecker-structured covariance matrices (CM) for complex elliptically symmetric (CES) data. To obtain a well-conditioned estimate of the CM, we add penalty terms of Kullback-Leibler divergence to the negative log-likelihood function of the associated complex angular Gaussian (CAG) distribution. This is shown to be equivalent to regularizing Tyler's fixed-point equations by shrinkage. A sufficient condition that the solution exists is discussed. An iterative algorithm is applied to solve the resulting fixed-point iterations and its convergence is proved. In order to solve the critical problem of tuning the shrinkage factors, we then introduce three methods by exploiting oracle approximating shrinkage (OAS) and cross-validation (CV). The proposed algorithms are applied to the CM estimation for polarization-space-time adaptive processing (PSTAP) in the context of heterogeneous clutter, where the clutter can be modeled using CES distributions with a Kronecker product-structured CM. When the training samples are limited, the proposed estimator, referred to as the robust shrinkage Kronecker estimator (RSKE), has better performance compared with several existing methods. Simulations are conducted for validating the proposed estimator and demonstrating its high performance.