Non-parametric detection in underwater environments

Motivated by the recurring use of the generalized Gaussian family to model different underwater noise sources and the asymptotic performance levels of some commonly used detectors for this family, the authors examined the performance of these detectors for several different underwater noise sources. The sources considered are non-Gaussian, highly correlated, and generally nonstationary, and they vary from being lighter- to heavier-tailed than Gaussian. Although the linear detector had the best performance, the linear rank detector and the L-level uniform quantizer consistently had similar performance levels. Because of their simplicity and robustness, either of these detectors would seem to be the best choice for these environments