Detection of weak stochastic signals in non-Gaussian noise: a general result

The paper studies the performance of a locally optimum detector namely, the generalized energy detector and shows that its performance starts to deteriorate as the signal to noise ratio increases beyond a certain level. The study has been carried out to cover a much broader class of signal and noise distributions than allowed in previous studies to conclude that the performance of the generalized energy detector can become poorer than that of the power detector well within the practical range of signal to noise ratios and the apparently large gains predicted by the asymptotic theory may not be reachable in practice