Spatial Sign and Rank Cyclic Detectors

This letter proposes robust nonparametric cyclic detectors based on the spatial sign and magnitude rank concepts. The proposed detectors are single-cycle detectors exploiting the known (conjugate) cyclic autocorrelation of the signal of interest. Cyclostationarity allows distinguishing among different signals and emitters that exhibit distinct cyclostationary properties. The asymptotic distributions of the proposed cyclic detectors are established under the null hypothesis when only noise is present. Simulation results demonstrate the robust performance of the proposed detection algorithms in both Gaussian and heavy-tailed non-Gaussian noise environments.