Multichannel moment detectors for transients in shallow-water noise

This paper presents an evaluation of second, third, and fourth-order moments for the passive detection of transient signals in both simulated Gaussian noise and measured noise. The measured noise was recorded by a vertical array located near the San Diego, CA, harbor and is dominated at low frequencies by ship-generated noise. The detectors assume neither noise nor signal stationarity and can use single or multiple channels of data. Simulation results indicate that the fourth-order moment detector often performs better than the energy detector in the correlated measured noise, with increasing channel contributions to the moment function, resulting in increased gain. The results in simulated Gaussian noise likewise favor the fourth-order moment detector, at least for the signals with significant fourth-order moments, but the ability of the higher order detector to discriminate against correlated noise is evident. Analysis over a 30-min segment of the measured noise with selected signals demonstrates that fourth-order detection gains can be reliably expected as the noise statistics change.