A Low-complexity Steered Minimum Variance Beamforming Algorithm and Its Application on Weak-target Detection

Although the character of high azimuth resolution and without side lobe, steered minimum variance(STMV) beamforming algorithm is limited to engineering application because of its computational cost. A low complexity steered minimum variance(LCSTMV) beamforming algorithm is proposed in this paper. The block matrix iterative inversion formula is deduced, the computation complexity of the traditional STMV algorithm with M array elements is reduced to nearly 1/4M. The simulation data analysis shows that its performance is in good agreement with that of the traditional STMV algorithm. And the processing with the sea trial data shows that the LCSTMV algorithm inherits all of the ability of STMV while computational amount reduced sharply.