Performance Improvement for Wideband Beamforming with White Noise Reduction Based on Sparse Arrays

A method is proposed for reducing the effect of white noise in wideband sparse arrays via a combination of a judiciously designed transformation followed by highpass filters. The reduced noise level leads to a higher signal to noise ratio for the system, which can have a significant effect on the performance of various beamforming methods. As a representative example, the reference signal based (RSB) and the Linearly Constrained Minimum Variance (LCMV) beamformers are employed here to demonstrate the improved beamforming performance, as confirmed by simulation results.