Performance analysis of a robust signal strength test
Don R. Van Rheeden, Joel K. McWilliams · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1992
In tracking applications, one needs to know if the characteristics of the signal at the location to be tracked are sufficient for tracking. Specific characteristics for this purpose depend on the particular tracking algorithm, but typical characteristics are signal strength compared to the noise, edge strength, and signal shape. This article considers the signal strength characteristic. A signal strength test based on robust statistical methods is shown. The test makes a histogram of the area to be tracked and tests the hypothesis that the histogram is due to noise only. This test is very practical for digitized signals processed by a real-time processor. The robust method makes the test insensitive to many characteristics of sensor noise. The test is described, and a detection/false alarm performance analysis for the test on certain signals is given. The performance analysis uses joint distributions of order statistics applied to mixture density functions. The result of the analysis is the test threshold as a function of rms sensor noise and required signal-to-noise ratio.