Scanning radar angular superresolution with fast standard Capon beamformer

A scheme of fast standard Capon beamformer (SCB) is proposed for scanning radar angular superresolution aiming at the computation burden caused by large swath mapping in azimuth. First, using the similar block tridiagonal property between the covariance matrix and Schur complement of its submatrix, the fast matrix inverse works in an improved divide and conquer (D&C) approach by recursively breaking down the problem of fast inverse into the same sub-problems. Secondly, based on the circulant structure of steering matrix, the SCB estimate of every assumed grids are rewritten by linear convolution. The resulting algorithm is shown to reduce the necessary computational load with one power without noticeable loss of performance.