Necessary conditions for a maximum likelihood estimate to become asymptotically unbiased and attain the Cramer-Rao lower bound. Part I. General approach with an application to time-delay and Doppler shift estimation.

Analytic expressions for the first order bias and second order covariance of a general maximum likelihood estimate (MLE) are presented. These expressions are used to determine general analytic conditions on sample size, or signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), that are necessary for a MLE to become asymptotically unbiased and attain minimum variance as expressed by the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB). The expressions are then evaluated for multivariate Gaussian data. The results can be used to determine asymptotic biases. variances, and conditions for estimator optimality in a wide range of inverse problems encountered in ocean acoustics and many other disciplines. The results are then applied to rigorously determine conditions on SNR necessary for the MLE to become unbiased and attain minimum variance in the classical active sonar and radar time-delay and Doppler-shift estimation problems. The time-delay MLE is the time lag at the peak value of a matched filter output. It is shown that the matched filter estimate attains the CRLB for the signal's position when the SNR is much larger than the kurtosis of the expected signal's energy spectrum. The Doppler-shift MLE exhibits dual behavior for narrow band analytic signals. In a companion paper, the general theory presented here is applied to the problem of estimating the range and depth of an acoustic source submerged in an ocean waveguide.