Ensemble estimation of polarization ellipse parameters

An ellipse describes the polarized part of a partially polarized quasi-monochromatic plane wave field. Its azimuth angle and aspect ratio are functions of the elements of the covariance matrix associated with the polarized part at a particular time instant. Given an ensemble of K independent samples at that time, the distributions of the estimators of these parameters are derived. The estimation is thus based on a sample ensemble at any time, and does not assume temporal stationarity. Additionally, the azimuth angle estimator has an angular distribution so that non-standard statistical methods are needed when deriving its mean and standard deviation.