Wavelets in the frequency domain for narrowband process detection

Detecting signals that are long, weak, and narrowband is a well known and important problem in acoustic signal processing. In this paper an ad hoc scheme is developed: its stages include the DFT, a multiresolution decomposition in the frequency domain, and a GLRT. The computational load is light, and the performance is remarkably good. This is so not just in the original narrowband situation, but also, due to an inherent adaptivity to the data, in the detection of signals that are relatively broadband in nature. Generalizations are given to CFAR operation in both prewhitened and unwhitened cases, and to the detection of multi-band signals. As regards the last, it is discovered that there is little loss from over-estimating the number of bands