Another Zero-Crossing Principle for Detecting Narrow-Band Signals

This paper describes a zero-crossing principle for detecting weak narrow-band signals immersed in Gaussian noise. This principle leads to a zero-crossing detector (detector II) which is relatively insensitive to system gain fluctuations. Moreover, for the detection of a weak sine wave in noise, zero-crossing detector II performs only 1.2 dB worse than the time-honored square-law detector. An application of the zero-crossing principle to the problem of incoherent detection of a stationary radar target in clutter is discussed.