Impulse detection and rejection methods for radio systems

Abstract

Impulses that exist in the nature or are artificial may severely decrease the performance of any radio system including communication and interception receivers and radars. This paper investigates impulse detection in receivers that can have either a single antenna or an antenna array. The proposed detector uses either a backward or forward outlier search strategy and assumes zero mean signals and spatially and temporally white background noise. Signal need not to be weak, i.e., signal-to-noise ratio may be large and the methods still works. The backward method uses all the data in an initial step whereas the forward method uses smaller, (hopefully) clean set in an initial step. The forward method is expected to perform better. Simulations confirm this expectation. Indeed, the used forward method can detect outliers even if their contamination exceeds 90% of all the samples.