Performance of pulse-pair method of Doppler estimation

Because of its simplicity, the pulse-pair method is usually used in the estimation of Doppler from backscattered acoustic signals. In the literature, various improvements to the basic pulse-pair estimate have been proposed. The statistics of these improved methods have also been derived using simplified assumptions for the signal and noise. By developing a multiplicative noise model for the backscatter signal, in this work, the variance of the Doppler estimate is derived under all signal scenarios. The dependency of the variance on the amplitude correlation length of the data is also discussed. It is demonstrated that the use of parabolic window in the estimate is the proper method of Doppler evaluation under all conditions.