On Signal Detection, Signal Perception, and Ideal Observers
M. V. Mathews, Edward E. David · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1959
Recently a number of perception studies in which a subject is asked to determine whether a stimulus consists of noise or noise plus a sinusoid have been analyzed as statistical hypothesis tests. The subjective results are frequently compared with a mathematical model, called an ideal observer, which achieves the optimum detection based on 2TW samples of the stimulus, where T is the duration and W is the band width of the stimulus. A maximum-likelihood detection model is developed which utilizes more than 2TW samples and achieves better detection than the ideal observer. The implications of this result in signal perception experiments are considered.