Spatial Correlation Lag Weighting for Arrays with Redundancies

✍ Scribed by I.S.D. Solomon

• Book ID: 102570348
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 245 KB
• Volume: 12
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1051-2004
• DOI: 10.1006/dspr.2002.0451

✦ Synopsis

The weighted fourier integral method (WFIM) beamformer was proposed by the author for platform mounted passive sonar hydrophone arrays and found to provide promising results. In this paper the WFIM beamformer for arbitrary applications is considered where an array with redundancies is employed. A procedure for obtaining a desired spatial response with this beamformer is outlined, and a variant of this beamformer (called WFIM-ML), which uses a maximum likelihood technique for estimating the spatial correlation lags, is presented. For the WFIM-ML beamformer, the work of J. P. Burg, D. G. Luenberger, and D. L. Wenger (1982, Proc. IEEE 9, 963-974) is exploited in estimating the correlation lags from the spatial covariance matrix of an array with redundancies. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate how a desired spatial response may be achieved using either the WFIM or the WFIM-ML beamformer and how these beamformers can outperform the conventional beamformer. Using experimental data, collected from a sparse sonar array, the WFIM-ML beamformer is shown to provide significant improvements over the WFIM beamformer.