Adaptive Selective Sidelobe Canceller Beamformer With Applications to Interference Mitigation in Radio Astronomy

Achieving better imaging of weak sources in the presence of strong interfering sources is a major challenge in various fields of signal processing, such as radio astronomy, SAR imaging, SONAR and wideband signal processing. We present a new algorithm for parameter estimation that can be implemented when a moving array is used. This adaptive beamformer can be employed in a variety of applications, such as radio astronomy with synthetic aperture arrays, SAR imaging, DOA estimation in towed array SONAR and wideband DOA estimation. Analytic performance analysis is provided together with simulations and tests on a new radio astronomy array. All these indicate a significant improvement compared to currently used filterbank techniques such as the MVDR, when strong interference is present, either inside or outside the field of view of the array. The latter case is especially important when directional antennas are used.