Hough transform for long chirp detection

The online detection of a very long and weak chirp signal is studied. The signal has an extremely slowly decreasing frequency, and is corrupted by white Gaussian noise and possibly also by powerful tones. By exploring and comparing candidate methods, it is found that the Hough transform (HT) detector appears to be most suitable given constraints on computational load and detectability. The analytical and the simulational performance of the HT detector are obtained and compared with the analytical performance of the generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT), which is assumed to be optimal. Applying a suitable threshold for the HT can increase speed dramatically while preserving performance. We have found that both dithering (taking varied frequency shifts for fast Fourier transforms (FFTs)) and increasing the FFT length can reduce the minimum detectable frequency slope with nearly no additional computation.