POLYNOMIAL ESTIMATION OF THE AMPLITUDE OF A SIGNAL

The problem of estimating the amplitude of a signal is addressed using higher-order statistics. The probability distribution of the noise is assumed to be unknown so that the maximum likelihood estimator cannot be calculated. The estimator is taken as a polynomial of the observat ion, the coefficients of which are determined so that the estimate is unbiased with minimum variance. This method generalizes the linear app roach, and the estimate variance is reduced. The case of linear-quadra tic estimation is detailed, and numerical examples are presented.