Bilinear signal synthesis in array processing

Multiple source signals impinging on an antenna array can be separated by time-frequency synthesis techniques. Averaging of the time-frequency distributions (TFDs) of the data across the array permits the spatial signatures of sources to play a fundamental role in improving the synthesis performance. Array averaging introduces a weighting function in the time-frequency domain that decreases the noise levels, reduces the interactions of the source signals, and mitigates the crossterms. This is achieved independent of the temporal characteristics of the source signals and without causing any smearing of the signal terms. The weighting function may take noninteger values, which are determined by the communication channel, the source positions, and their angular separations. Unlike the recently devised blind source separation methods using spatial TFDs, the proposed method does not require whitening or retrieval of the source directional matrix. The paper evaluates the proposed method in terms of performance and computations relative to the existing source separation techniques based on quadratic TFDs.