A low complexity robust detector in impulsive noise

This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of a nonlinear extension to the matched filter for signal detection in certain kinds of non-Gaussian noise. The decision statistic is based on a new measure of similarity that can be considered as an extension of the correlation statistic used in the matched filter. The optimality of the matched filter is predicated on second order statistics and hence leaves room for improvement, especially when the assumption of Gaussianity is not applicable. The proposed method incorporates higher order moments in the decision statistic and shows an improvement in the receiver operating characteristics (ROC) for non-Gaussian noise, in particular, those that are impulsive distributed. The performance of the proposed method is demonstrated for detection in two types of widely used impulsive noise models, the alpha-stable model and the two-term Gaussian mixture model. Moreover, unlike other kernel based approaches, and those using the characteristic functions directly, this method is still computationally tractable and can easily be implemented in real-time.