White Noise Reduction for Wideband Linear Array Signal Processing

The performance of wideband array signal processing algorithms is dependent on the noise level in the system. A method is proposed for reducing the level of white noise in wideband linear arrays via a judiciously designed spatial transformation followed by a bank of highpass filters. A detailed analysis of the method and its effect on the spectrum of the signal and noise is presented. The reduced noise level leads to a higher signal to noise ratio (SNR) for the system, which can have a significant beneficial effect on the performance of various beamforming methods and other array signal processing applications such as direction of arrival (DOA) estimation. Here we focus on the beamforming problem and study the improved performance of two well-known beamformers, namely the reference signal based (RSB) and the linearly constrained minimum variance (LCMV) beamformers. Both theoretical analysis and simulation results are provided. Index Terms White noise reduction, uniform linear arrays, nonuniform linear arrays, wideband beamforming, direction of arrival estimation, performance analysis.