EE381K Multidimensional Digital Signal Processing

and

Telecommunication and Signal Processing Seminar

"An Overview of Sonar Beamforming Algorithms and Implementations"

by

Gregory E. Allen

Applied Research Laboratories

The University of Texas, Austin, TX

Monday, October 16, 2:30 PM, ENS 602

We first give an overview of continuous-time and discrete-time approaches to beamforming. Beamforming is a signal processing technique applied to the data received by an array of sensors to detect and locate objects in an environment, e.g. locating whales using sonar. Beamformers use the spatial and temporal information to improve source localization. In discrete-time beamformers, the data is sampled in space and time. We can use additional time samples (snapshots) to improve resolution. After the overview, we will discuss real-time implementations of sonar beamformers, which require several GFLOPS of computation.

• Introduction
• Continuous-time beamforming
• Discrete-time beamforming
• A subset of the slides from Computational Process Networks for Real-Time High-Throughput Signal and Image Processing Systems on Workstations

• D. E. Dudgeon and R. M. Mersereau, Multidimensional Digital Signal Processing, Prentice-Hall, Inc., pp. 289-311.
• R. G. Pridham and R. A. Mucci, "A Novel Approach to Digital Beamforming." Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 63, no. 2, pp. 425-434, Feb. 1978.
• R. G. Pridham and R. A. Mucci, "Digital Interpolation Beamforming for Low-Pass and Bandpass Signals." Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 67, no. 6, pp. 904-919, June 1979.
• R. A. Mucci, "A Comparison of Efficient Beamforming Algorithms." IEEE Transactions on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, vol. ASSP-32, no. 3, 548-558, June 1984.
• G. E. Allen and B. L. Evans, "Real-Time Sonar Beamforming on Workstations Using Process Networks and POSIX Threads", IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, pp. 921-926, March 2000.