Robust Broadband Beamforming using Bilinear Programming

We introduce a new method for robust beamforming, where the goal is to estimate a signal from array samples when there is uncertainty in the angle of arrival. Our method offers state-of-the-art performance on narrowband signals and is naturally applied to broadband signals. Our beamformer operates by treating the forward model for the array samples as unknown. We show that the “true” forward model lies in the linear span of a small number of fixed linear systems. As a result, we can estimate the forward operator and the signal simultaneously by solving a bilinear inverse problem using least squares. Our numerical experiments show that if the angle of arrival is known to only be within an interval of reasonable size, there is very little loss in estimation performance compared to the case where the angle is known exactly.