True time-delay bandpass beamforming

A simple digital scheme for bandpass time-domain beamforming that is applicable when there is significant change in the envelope of the signal across the extent of an array of hydrophones is presented. The three requisite processes to obtain complex-baseband beam signals, namely, down conversion to complex baseband, time delay of the complex envelope, and phase rotation, are discussed. Down conversion is accomplished by subsampling the bandpass signal and an efficient interpolation technique is employed for time registration of these samples. Since the same interpolation technique is u sed to implement the time delay, the two processes are combined. With further modification to effect the phase rotation, it is shown how the three requisite processes for bandpass beamforming can be accomplished with a single analog-to-digital converter and two short finite impulse response filters.< >