Capon beamspace beamforming for distributed acoustic arrays

This paper presents the advantages of using distributed, arrays with the beamspace implementation of a wideband Capon algorithm. Distributed arrays have recently demonstrated a decreased sensitivity to environmental coherence loss and array mismatches. In an attempt to build upon this robustness, beamspace preprocessing is applied in this paper. Beamspace allows sector-focused beamforming and reduced computational complexity. A unique property of this implementation of beamspace, namely being indifferent to losses of entire channels of data, has been demonstrated. This implementation of beamspace to Capon beamforming does not require beam orthogonalization, thus saving computational time, especially in the whitening process.