Improved Capon Estimator for High-Resolution DOA Estimation and Its Statistical Analysis

Despite some efforts and attempts have been made to improve the direction-of-arrival(DOA)estimation performance of the standard Capon beamformer(SCB)in array processing,rigorous statistical performance analyses of these modified Capon estimators are still lacking.This paper studies an improved Capon estimator(ICE)for estimating the DOAs of multiple uncorrelated narrowband signals,where the higherorder inverse(sample)array covariance matrix is used in the Capon-like cost function.By establishing the relationship between this nonparametric estimator and the parametric and classic subspace-based MUSIC(multiple signal classification),it is clarified that as long as the power order of the inverse covariance matrix is increased to reduce the influence of signal subspace components in the ICE,the estimation performance of the ICE becomes equivalent to that of the MUSIC regardless of the signal-to-noise ratio(SNR).Furthermore the statistical performance of the ICE is analyzed,and the large-sample mean-squared-error(MSE)expression of the estimated DOA is derived.Finally the effectiveness and the theoretical analysis of the ICE are substantiated through numerical examples,where the Cramer-Rao lower bound(CRB)is used to evaluate the validity of the derived asymptotic MSE expression.

A double constrained robust capon beamforming based imaging method for early breast cancer detection

Ultra-wideband （UWB） microwave images are proposed for detecting small malignant breast tumors based on the large contrast of electric parameters between a malignant tumor and normal breast tissue. In this study, an antenna array composed of 9 antennas is applied to the detection. The double constrained robust capon beamforming （DCRCB） algorithm is used for reconstructing the breast image due to its better stability and high signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio （SINR）. The successful detection of a tumor of 2 mm in diameter shown in the reconstruction demonstrates the robustness of the DCRCB beamforming algorithm. This study verifies the feasibility of detecting small breast tumors by using the DCRCB imaging algorithm.

Bi-capon beamforming for MIMO radar based on rank-reduced correlation matrix

A bi-capon beamforming （BCB） algorithm for multi-input multi-output （MIMO） radar is developed on the basis of correlation domain. By vectorizing the echo matrix and its transpose, the conventional capon cost function is transformed into bi-capon quadratic functions. By calculating two lower dimensional weight vectors with sub-matrices of the correlation matrix, BCB can significantly decrease the computational complexity and the requirement of training samples. In the presence of short data records, BCB can achieve better interference suppression performance than fully adaptive capon algorithm. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.