Detection of weak stochastic signals in double-sided exponential noise using generalized energy detector

Abstract

Many locally optimum, suboptimum, and ad hoc detectors exploit knowledge of the noise probability density function (pdf) to obtain their test statistic for the detection of stochastic signals in non-Gaussian noise. These detectors appear to offer potential for highly improved performance for very small signal to noise ratios (asymptotically approaching zero). This paper studies a locally optimum detector namely the generalized energy detector, by deriving analytical expressions for a performance measure using a double-sided exponential noise pdf. The paper concludes that the apparently large gains predicted by the asymptotic theory may not be reachable within the practical range of signal-to-noise ratios.