DETECTING A TRANSIENT SIGNAL BY BISPECTRAL ANALYSIS

This paper presents a method for detecting a transient waveform of unknown shape in additive stationary noise. The method uses a statistic computed from the sample bispectrum of a sampled record of the signal-plus-noise of length T = Nτ, where l/τ is the sampling rate. The key result underlying the method is that the bispectrum of the noise is zero in a triangle that is a proper subset of the principal domain triangle. It is shown that the probability of detecting the signal is high if (3/16)1/2N5/6 is larger than ρ-1 where ρ is the energy signal-to-noise ratio. This result implies that the bispectrum based test may detect a weak signal of unknown form which evades detection by other methods. © 1990 IEEE