Multiple‐input multiple‐output sonar adaptive beamforming using transmission diversity smoothing and backward processing

Abstract Benefit from the transmission diversity smoothing (TDS) effect upon coherent targets decorrelation, the kind of adaptive beamformers can be directly applied for multiple‐input multiple‐output (MIMO) sonar applications. Increasing the number of transmitted signals helps improve the TDS‐based decorrelation performance. However, a large number of transmitters is not feasible for those sonar systems mounted on small platforms with limited space. To address the lack of TDS‐based degrees of freedom for smoothing, an improved TDS decorrelation method is proposed for MIMO sonar in this study. With the conjugated MIMO data covariance matrix being left‐multiplied and right‐multiplied, respectively, by the exchange matrix, the authors obtain a backward‐smoothed data covariance matrix. Afterwards, the authors average it with the original MIMO receiving data covariance matrix to reconstruct a new data covariance matrix. Compared with TDS, the improved TDS strengthens the decorrelation performance by increasing the number of covariance matrix for smoothing and thus enables the new rank restored signal covariance matrix to have better non‐singularity. Without increasing any aperture loss and system complexity, a lower correlation between echoes is obtained, and the performance of the minimum variance distortionless response beamformer is hence improved in the presence of coherent targets. The effectiveness of the proposed decorrelation method is verified by numerical simulations and real data from a water tank experiment.