Robust detectors for signals in non-Gaussian noise

The robustness of suboptimal nonlinear detectors for known discrete-time signals in non-Gaussian noise is investigated. The measure of robustness used is the degradation of asymptotic relative efficiency (compared to a linear detector) from that achieved by an optimal nonlinear detector. The first order density of non-Gaussian noise is modeled as a mixture of a small variance Gaussian background noise pdf and a large variance impulsive pdf.