Inverse Beam Pattern Transform and Spatial Sampling for Uniform Array From Broadband Beamforming Perspective

A sensor array collects spatial samples of propagating wave fields, and a beamformer performs spatial filtering to preserve the desired signal while suppressing interfering signals and noise arriving from directions other than the direction of interest. Given a signal with wideband frequency, using a uniform array is one of the most common approaches to obtain broadband beamforming. In this work, a function formulating the relations between the sensor coefficients and its beam pattern over frequency is introduced. The function is called inverse beam pattern transform. The inverse beam pattern transform mainly contains the coordinate transform and inverse Fourier transform. From the view of spatial aliasing, the inter-distance of the sensors should be less than half of the minimum wavelength of the signal. However, from the bijection of the new function and broadband beamforming perspective, this paper proposes the other lower and upper bounds for the inter-distance. Within these bounds, the new function is the bijective function which can be applied to design the uniform array with broadband beamforming.