Detection of false transients
Lorenzo Galleani, Leon W. Cohen, Douglas J. Nelson · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2005
When one calculates a time-frequency distribution of white noise there sometimes appear transients of short duration. Superficially, these transients appear to be real signals but they are not. This comes about by random chance in the noise and also because particular types of distributions do not resolve components well in time. These fictitious signals can be misclassified by detectors and hence it is important to understand their origin and statistical properties. We present experimental studies regarding these false transients, and by simulation we statistically quantify their duration for various distributions. We compare the number and duration of the false transients when different distributions are used.