Cumulant-based blind optimum beamforming

The authors propose blind estimation of the source steering vector in the presence of multiple, directional, correlated or coherent Gaussian interferers via higher-order statistics. In any application, only sample statistics are available, so a robust beamforming approach that employs the steering vector estimate obtained by cumulant-based signal processing is suggested. A method that employs both covariance and cumulant information to combat finite sample effects is also proposed, as is an adaptive version of the authors´ algorithm. Simulations demonstrate the excellent performance of the approach in a wide variety of situations.