Robust and rapid converging adaptive beamforming via a subspace method for the signal-plus-interferences covariance matrix estimation

The presence of the desired signal (DS) in the training snapshots makes the adaptive beamformer sensitive to any steering vector mismatch and dramatically reduces the convergence rate. Even the performance of the most of the existing robust adaptive beamformers is degraded when the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is increased. In this study, a high converging rate robust adaptive beamformer is proposed. This method is a promoted eigenspace-based beamformer. In this paper, a new signal-plus-interferences (SPI) covariance matrix estimator is proposed. The subspace of the ideal SPI covariance matrices is exploited and the estimated covariance matrix is projected into this subspace. This projection effectively reduces the covariance matrix estimation error and the proposed estimator yields a more accurate estimation of the SPI covariance matrix. In addition, a computationally efficient steering vector estimator has been proposed. To prevent the absence of the DS steering vector in the estimated SPI subspace, the estimated SPI covariance matrix is compensated. Hence, the proposed method can attain the optimal beamformer in the both high and low SNR cases. The numerical examples indicate that this method has excellent signal-to-interference plus noise ratio performance and offers a higher converging rate compared with the existing robust adaptive beamforming algorithms.