  Multitaper estimators have enjoyed significant success in estimating spectral
densities from finite samples using as tapers Slepian functions defined on the
acquisition domain. Unfortunately, the numerical calculation of these Slepian
tapers is only tractable for certain symmetric domains, such as rectangles or
disks. In addition, no performance bounds are currently available for the mean
squared error of the spectral density estimate. This situation is inadequate
for applications such as cryo-electron microscopy, where noise models must be
estimated from irregular domains with small sample sizes. We show that the
multitaper estimator only depends on the linear space spanned by the tapers. As
a result, Slepian tapers may be replaced by proxy tapers spanning the same
subspace (validating the common practice of using partially converged solutions
to the Slepian eigenproblem as tapers). These proxies may consequently be
calculated using standard numerical algorithms for block diagonalization. We
also prove a set of performance bounds for multitaper estimators on arbitrary
domains. The method is demonstrated on synthetic and experimental datasets from
cryo-electron microscopy, where it reduces mean squared error by a factor of
two or more compared to traditional methods.
