Null broadening with snapshot-deficient covariance matrices in passive sonar

Adaptive-array beamforming achieves high resolution and sidelobe suppression by producing sharp nulls in the adaptive beampattern. Large-aperture sonar arrays with many elements have small resolution cells; interferers may move through many resolution cells in the time required for accumulating a full-rank sample covariance matrix. This leads to snapshot-deficient processing. In this paper, the null-broadening technique originally developed for an ideal stationary problem is extended to the snapshot-deficient problem combined with white-noise constraint (WNC) adaptive processing. Null broadening allows the strong interferers to move through resolution cells and increases the number of degrees of freedom, thereby improving the detection of weak stationary signals.