An extended energy detector for non-Gaussian and non-independent noise

Energy detectors are optimum to detect uncorrelated Gaussian signals or GLRT to detect completely unknown signals; in both cases, noise background must be uncorrelated Gaussian. However, energy detectors degrade when noise background is non-independent and nonGaussian. An extension is presented in this paper to deal with this situation. Independence is achieved by means of a matrix linear transformation derived from independent component analysis. Non-Gaussianity is avoided by applying a scalar non-linear function to every element of the linearly transformed observation vector. Practical procedures for estimating the linear and nonlinear transformations are given in the paper. A SNR enhancement factor has been defined for the weak signal case, which appears to be indicative of the expected improvement of the proposed extension of the energy detectors. Some simulations illustrate the achieved improvements.