On the use of matching pursuit time-frequency techniques for multiple-channel detection

In situations where the presence of a signal is to be detected in several noisy channels, often one channel will have higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) than the others. When the SNR on one channel is sufficiently high that the signal can be extracted from that channel, it may be possible to use the extracted signal to aid in detecting the presence of the signal on the other channels. The matching pursuit time-frequency method with matched signal dictionaries is used to extract a chirp signal from a noisy channel. The extracted signal is used in one channel of a generalized coherence (GC) detector with the goal of detecting the presence of the signal on other, even noisier, channels. This approach is compared via simulation to a GC detector that does not pre-process the highest SNR channel to extract the signal. Detector performance is shown to be significantly enhanced by matching pursuit signal extraction prior to coherence estimation.