A robust approach to optimum widely linear MVDR beamformer

In many array processing, the received signals are nonstationary, or in particular, noncircular. Widely linear minimum variance distortionless response (WL MVDR) beamformers can exploit the noncircularity of received signals and improve the performance of the conventional MVDR beamformer. However, in the optimum WL MVDR beamformer, the array steering vector (ASV) and the signal noncircularity coefficient should be known a priori for the signal of interest. This requirement puts strict limitation to the implementation of this beamformer. We therefore in this paper propose a robust approach to the optimal WL MVDR beamformer that can deal with the uncertainties in the ASV and noncircularity coefficient. Two variants of the proposed approach are developed based on the treatment of the uncertainties. By doing so, the requirement on the exact information is relaxed while the performance improvement can still be obtained. Simulation studies are also provided to illustrate the performance of the proposed approach

Single antenna power measurements based direction finding

In this paper, the problem of estimating direction-ofarrival (DOA) of multiple uncorrelated sources from single antenna power measurements is addressed. Utilizing the fact that the antenna pattern is bandlimited and can be modeled as a finite sum of complex exponentials, we first show that the problem can be transformed into a frequency estimation problem. Then, we explain how the annihilating filter method can be used to solve for the DOA in the noiseless case. In the presence of noise, we propose to use Cadzow denoising that is formulated as an iterative algorithm derived fromexploiting the matrix rank and linear structure properties. Furthermore, we have also derived the Cramér–Rao Bound (CRB) and reviewed several alternative approaches that can be used as a comparison to the proposed approach. From the simulation and experimental results, we demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly outperforms other approaches. It is also evident from the Monte Carlo analysis that the proposed approach converges to the CRB.Accepted versio