Performance analysis of Low-complexity MVDR beamformer in spherical harmonics domain.

•Low-complexity spherical harmonics MVDR (LC-SHMVDR) beamformer is designed by unitary transformations.•Some relevant statistics are derived theoretically to study the MVDR beamformer performance affected by finite sample and real-valued processing.•Compared with the traditional spherical harmonics MVDR (SHMVDR) beamfomer, the proposed method has lower computation cost and better performance.