An Improved Reduced-Dimension Robust Capon Beamforming Method Using Krylov Subspace Techniques

A reduced-dimension robust Capon beamforming method using Krylov subspace techniques (RDRCB) is a diagonal loading algorithm with low complexity, fast convergence and strong anti-interference ability. The diagonal loading level of RDRCB is known to become invalid if the initial value of the Newton iteration method is incorrect and the Hessel matrix is non-positive definite. To improve the robustness of RDRCB, an improved RDRCB (IRDRCB) was proposed in this study. We analyzed the variation in the loading factor with the eigenvalues of the reduced-dimensional covariance matrix and derived the upper and lower boundaries of the diagonal loading level; the diagonal loading level of the IRDRCB was kept within the bounds mentioned above. The computer simulation results show that the IRDRCB can effectively solve the problems of a sharp decline in the signal-to-noise ratio gain and an invalid diagonal loading level. The experimental results demonstrate that the interference noise of the IRDRCB is 3~5 dB higher than that of conventional adaptive beamforming, and the computational complexity is reduced by 15% to 20% compared with that of the RCB method.