Estimation and detection in the presence of ringing noise

To minimize size and cost, most air coupled ultra sound range systems are designed as mono-static systems, where the same transducer is used for both transmission and reception. Mono-static systems suffer from a type of self interference which is referred to as ringing noise or ring-down. Ringing noise may occlude echoes from nearby targets, compromising the detection performance of the system at short ranges. This paper describes a simple method for detecting target returns embedded in ringing noise and compares the performance of the proposed method to a more popular CFAR technique.