A novel algorithm is proposed for two-dimensional direction of arrival (2D-DOA) estimation with uniform rectangular array using reduced-dimension propagator method (RD-PM). The proposed algorithm requires no eigenvalue decomposition of the covariance matrix of the receive data and simplifies two-dimensional global searching in two-dimensional PM (2D-PM) to one-dimensional local searching. The complexity of the proposed algorithm is much lower than that of 2D-PM. The angle estimation performance

more »

... of the proposed algorithm is better than that of estimation of signal parameters via rotational invariance techniques (ESPRIT) algorithm and conventional PM algorithms, also very close to 2D-PM. The angle estimation error and Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) are derived in this paper. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm can achieve automatically paired 2D-DOA estimation. The simulation results verify the effectiveness of the algorithm.