Adaptive and Hybrid Kronecker Product Beamforming for Far-Field Speech Signals

•The ULA can be represented in terms to two smaller virtual ULAs (VULAs) using the Kronecker product.•MVDR adaptive beamformers are obtained separately for the VULAs, and combined using the Kronecker product to obtain the full-length KP-MVDR beamformer.•Implementing the fixed DS beamformer on one VULA and the MVDR adaptive beamformer on the other results in the KP-DS-MVDR and KP-MVDR-DS hybrid beamformers.•The Kronecker product beamformers are more robust to errors in the statistical estimates of the data, and provide superior performances to the conventional DS and MVDR beamformers.•The Kronecker product beamformers require less data (faster convergence) to achieve their steady state performances compared to the conventional MVDR beamformer.