Detection of a sinusoidal signal in the presence of directional interference

This paper compares the performance of full beam energy detection and split beam cross correlation for detecting the persence of a sinusoidal directional signal in the presence of interfering directional clutter and uncorrelated noise. The sensor is assumed to be a line array and a detection is made by comparing the mean of a spectral analysis bin with the mean of neighboring bins. The comparisons are based on calculations of the mean and standard deviation of the detection statistic for the two processors. The results indicate that there are situations when split beam cross correlation can provide a substantial advantage in detecting a sinusoidal signal against a fluctuating background of directional clutter and noise. In addition to the detection comparisons, the ability of the two approaches to separate two contacts that overlap spectrally by using the additional discriminants of bearing and bearing rate are compared. These comparisons indicate that the split beam cross correlator is more effective at resolving contacts than the full beam energy detector.