The detection characteristics of fluctuating pulsed optical signals in systems with an unstable quantization level

Analytic formulas have been obtained for the detection characteristics of fluctuating pulsed optical signals against a Gaussian noise background, taking into consideration the instability of the triggering level of the threshold device. It is shown that the triggering level instability exerts a greater effect on the false alarm probability than on the system sensitivity. In addition, under certain conditions the false alarm probability depends in a significant manner on the statistical properties of the variance of the quantization level.