A comparison of methods for estimating broadband noise in the frequency domain

Estimating the noise component of a signal that consists of sinusoids plus broadband noise is a ubiquitous problem. Most methods work in the time-domain, but frequency-domain methods can be computationally more efficient and invariant to the time-domain noise distribution. We compare two prominent frequency-domain approaches, one that computes statistics over periodograms of multiple time segments, and another that computes statistics over frequency segments from a single periodogram. We explore the accuracy-resolution tradeoff for both approaches and provide comparisons of accuracy, sample and segment size dependence, frequency resolution, and computational complexity for each method.