A study on wideband adaptive beamforming based on WBRCB for passive uniform line array sonar

Abstract

: Adaptive beamforming methods are known to suppress sidelobes and improve detection performance of weak signal by constructing weight vectors depending on the received signal itself. A standard adaptive beamforming like the MVDR (Minimum Variance Distortionless Response) is very sensitive to mismatches between weight vectors and actual signal steering vectors. Also, a large computational complexity for estimating a stable covariance matrix is required when wideband beamforming for a large-scale array is used. In this paper, we exploit the WBRCB (Wideband Robust Capon Beamforming) method for stable and robust wideband adaptive beamforming of a passive large uniform line array sonar. To improve robustness of adaptive beamforming performance in the presence of mismatches, we extract a optimum mismatch parameter. WBRCB with extracted mismatch parameter shows performance improvement in beamforming using synthetic and experimental passive sonar signals.