Fully Automatic Computation of Diagonal Loading Levels for Robust Adaptive Beamforming

The main drawback of the conventional diagonal loading (DL) approaches is that there is no clear guideline on how to choose the DL level reliably or how to select user parameters appropriately. An algorithm that can be used to compute the DL level completely automatically from the given data without the need of specifying any user parameter is considered. In this algorithm an enhanced covariance matrix estimate obtained via a shrinkage method, instead of the sample covariance matrix, is used in the standard Capon beamforming formulation. The performance of the resulting beamformer is illustrated via numerical examples, and it is compared with several other adaptive beamformers.