Robust Capon beamforming exploiting the second-order noncircularity of signals

Abstract This paper extends the worst-case performance optimization based robust Capon beamformer (RCB) to the generalized case with possible noncircular signal-of-interest (SOI) and/or noncircular interferences. The proposed widely linear (WL) beamformer exploits the second-order noncircularity of the SOI and interferences simultaneously, and it is robust against the errors in the steering vector, sample covariance matrix and estimated noncircularity coefficient of the SOI. Further, a theoretical performance analysis for the class of WL beamformers using generalized loading in the presence of steering vector errors is presented. The superior performance of the proposed beamformer over the RCB is demonstrated by the theoretical results and various numerical experiments.