On Transient and Periodic Signal Detection in Time-Varying Noise Power

Detectability of periodic and synchronously recurrent transient signals in a noisy environment in which the noise power is time varying is investigated. For at least one noise model, it is shown that the basic nonlinearity of the optimum detector is a limiter. Performance of this optimum detector is compared with analog cross-correlation and clipper cross-correlation (CCC) detectors. It is shown that the CCC performs nearly optimally, especially at low signal-to-noise ratios, and that its performance is significantly better than that of the analog cross correlator.