Critical analysis of the eigenfilter method for the design of FIR filters and wideband beamformers

The least squares based eigenfilter method has been applied to the design of both finite impulse response (FIR) filters and wideband beamformers successfully. It involves calculating the resultant filter coefficients as the eigenvector of an appropriate Hermitian matrix, and offers lower complexity and less computation time with better numerical stability as compared to the standard least squares method. In this paper, we revisit the method and critically analyze the eigenfilter approach by revealing a serious performance issue in the passband of the designed FIR filter and the mainlobe of the wideband beamformer, which occurs due to a formulation problem. A solution is then proposed to mitigate this issue, and design examples for both FIR filters and wideband beamformers are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.