Part II: Degradation of Detectability Due to Clipping

The output signals from the hydrophones in a directional sonar array are frequently clipped before being processed further. The effect of this is analyzed in this paper by comparing the figures of merit of likelihood-ratio detectors operating on clipped and unclipped data. It is found that if the number of hydrophones is large, the figure of merit is reduced by a factor of about 2/π from the optimum value.