Autocorrelation-based frequency estimator for a noisy sinusoid

Frequency estimating is very important for the reliability of signal processing systems. In this paper, based on the trigonometric characters of sinusoidal signals, a new frequency estimator for a real sinusoid in white noise is proposed. The new estimator makes use of multiple autocorrelation lags to obtain an improved frequency estimator, which is derived from minimizing a constrained least squares cost function of autocorrelation sequence of signal. Computer simulations are included to contrast the estimator performance with several existing methods as well as the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB).