Robust Capon Beamforming via Shaping Beam Pattern

High sidelobe level and direction of arrival (DOA) estimation sensitivity are two major disadvantages of the Capon beamforming. To deal with these problems, this paper gives an overview of a series of robust Capon beamforming methods via shaping beam pattern, including sparse Capon beamforming, weighted sparse Capon beamforming, mixed norm based Capon beamforming, total variation minimization based Capon beamforming, mainlobe-to-sidelobe power ratio maximization based Capon beamforming. With these additional structure-inducing constraints, the sidelobe is suppressed, and the robustness against DOA mismatch is improved too. Simulations show that the obtained beamformers outperform the standard Capon beamformer. Index Terms array signal processing, robust Capon beamforming, beam pattern shaping, sidelobe suppression, direction of arrival (DOA) mismatch, sparse constraint, cosparse constraint.