MIPA detection procedures and estimation

The problem of signal detection in severe and/or changing noise environment is considered. In this paper, the theory of m-interval polynomial approximation (MIPA) is modified and extended to include the operation of detecting weak stochastic signals (low SNR) by an array of sensors. The main concern is to formulate the descriptive structure of the robust array when the functional form of the underlying noise distribution is poorly specified. In particular, we partition the observation space into a finite number of regions called intervals based on knowledge of only the quantiles of the noise distribution. Stochastic approximation procedures are used to estimate the design parameters of the array.