Patent ID: 6868042

Claim:
A method for defining amplitude and phase parameters of acoustic signals that propagate across sensor elements of an array of a beamforming processor for each array incident angle of interest, said beamforming processor having a steering and summing circuit, said signal definition method comprising the steps of: routing the output of each sensor element as first inputs to an adaptive filter having second inputs and having representative outputs, and to the steering and summing circuit of the beamforming processor having representative outputs interrelated to said representative outputs of said adaptive filter; subtracting the representative outputs of said adaptive filter from the interrelated and representative outputs of said steering and summing circuit so as to produce representative error outputs that are respectively routed to said second inputs of said adaptive filter; said error outputs approaching near zero which yield filter quantities, f n , one for each sensor element; and inverting each f n quantity so as to provide representative data-based steering vectors for said beamforming processor.