One robust capon beamformer for ultrasound imaging

Although the delay-and-sum (DAS) beamformer has limited image resolution and bad interference suppression capability, it is widely used in ultrasound imaging. The adaptive standard Capon beamformer (SCB) has better performance, but it fails to work with coherent or highly correlated echo signals and its performance is closely related to array steering vector errors. We will introduce an improved method, in which we use spatial smoothing and diagonal loading to decor-relate the echo signals and then conduct the robust capon beamforming algorithm (RCB). According to the characteristic of synthetic aperture, we will process the multistatic data using twice robust capon beamforming (RCB2). The excellent performance of the improved capon beamforming algorithm will be demonstrated via some simulated examples using Filed II.