Experimental performance of adaptive beamforming in a sonar environment with a towed array and moving interfering sources

The performances of adaptive array algorithms are known to suffer from a st rong degradation in scenarios with moving interfering sources. In this corr espondence, basic adaptive beamforming techniques are compared using shallo w sea sonar data recorded in a towed horizontal array environment with movi ng interfering sources originated from shipping noise. Our experimental res ults show the relationship between the practical performances of adaptive a nd conventional beamforming techniques compared in terms of output SINR or a related measure given by the noncompensated postbeamforming interference power. These results demonstrate noticeable performance improvements that c an be achieved using several robust algorithms relative to traditional adap tive beamforming schemes.