On conventional beamforming and deconvolution

Conventional beamforming is robust but suffers from fat beams and high level sidelobes. This paper applies the Lucy-Richardson algorithm to the conventional beam power (versus the complex beam output) similar to image de-blurring, and thus avoid the instability problem of common deconvolution algorithms. The deconvolved beam power yields narrow (high resolution) beams and low sidelobe levels. It is shown that a weak target is detected amid loud interferers (with 25 dB higher signal level) using this method similar to that using the high resolution method, such as the dominant mode rejection (DMR) method or MVDR with diagonal loading.