In this paper, we describe and analyze the perfor mance of a technique
for the quickest defection of a sinusoid of unknown frequency, amplit
ude, and phase in additive white noise, The approach is based on the w
ork of Broder and Schwartz and relies on asymptotic results, that is,
the ''signal'' to be detected as quickly as possible is assumed to be
of vanishingly small amplitude, which is the most difficult (and inter
esting) situation. In the literature, the relationship between the sma
ll-signal Page's test and locally optimal fixed-length detection theor
y is explored in detail for the case of a known contaminant, Here, the
se results are extended to the case of a stochastic contaminant (i.e.,
the unknown sinusoid). We derive the version of Page's test optimized
under the assumptions that the amplitude is small, the data arrives i
n blocks, and the frequency of the sinusoid is uniformly distributed i
n a given band, and we verify the performance predictions via simulati
on, To detect a sinusoid of completely unknown frequency, an ensemble
of such detectors is required, and this ensemble is very close to an F
FT-based scheme, If FFT's are to be used, however, the best performanc
e is obtained when each is augmented hy a half-band-shifted version of
itself.