A Bayesian approach to robust adaptive beamforming

  • Authors:
  • K.L. Bell;Y. Ephraim;H.L. Van Trees

  • Affiliations:
  • Dept. of Appl. & Eng. Stat., George Mason Univ., Fairfax, VA;-;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

An adaptive beamformer that is robust to uncertainty in source direction-of-arrival (DOA) is derived using a Bayesian approach. The DOA is assumed to be a discrete random variable with a known a priori probability density function (PDF) that reflects the level of uncertainty in the source DOA. The resulting beamformer is a weighted sum of minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) beamformers pointed at a set of candidate DOAs, where the relative contribution of each MVDR beamformer is determined from the a posteriori PDF of the DOA conditioned on previously observed data. A simple approximation to the a posteriori PDF results in a straightforward implementation. Performance of the approximate Bayesian beamformer is compared with linearly constrained minimum variance (LCMV) beamformers and data-driven approaches that attempt to estimate signal characteristics or the steering vector from the data