Universal adaptive beamforming: A Bayesian approach

We present a Bayesian universal beamforming framework for adaptive array processing in dynamic underwater acoustic environments with unknown and time-varying propagation geometry. Motivated by ideas from universal prediction and estimation, the proposed approach discretizes the angular domain into a finite set of steering hypotheses and recursively computes posterior probabilities over competing spatial models using observation-dependent likelihood functions. For Gaussian observation models, the posterior update reduces to an exponential-weights recursion driven by hypothesis-dependent beamformer evidence metrics. The resulting framework performs soft spatial inference and adaptive beamforming by continuously redistributing posterior probability across competing steering hypotheses while forming posterior-weighted combinations of branch outputs. The formulation naturally connects to classical adaptive beamformers including matched filtering and minimum mean-square error (MMSE) beamforming. In addition, the framework is extended toward broadband underwater acoustic communication receivers through frequency-domain beamformer synthesis and adaptive equalization. Posterior probabilities are updated according to branch-specific equalization errors, enabling joint spatial-temporal adaptation under multipath propagation, Doppler-induced distortions, and time-varying channel conditions. Experimental results using MACE data demonstrate reliable communication performance with low overhead, low data detection mean-squared error, and zero observed bit errors.