A preliminary assessment of Soviet development of optimum signal discrimination techniques: Optimum space-time processing

This study provides an overview of Soviet work in the subject of optimum signal discrimination techniques. Its purpose is to aid U.S. scientists in becoming more familiar with an extensive signal processing effort of which they undoubtedly have had little prior awareness. It provides general substantive comment and bibliographic resource materials. If this work is successful in accomplishing its goal, it will serve as an example of reverse technology transfer. The Soviets have, for several decades, taken a more rigorous statistical approach to the study of oceanic processes and the theory of detection signals in the ocean environment than has the United States. The Soviets view this environmental as non-Gaussian, nonstationary, and nonwhite, and do not avoid the complications this presents to the formulation of the theory of optimum signal detection and estimation. There appears to be poor U.S. access to this work. The United States would probably benefit from selected uses of Soviet theory and algorithm developments in this topic. Soviet development of optimum signal detection and estimation techniques is broadly based, covering various aspects of radar, sonar, and communications. They have an extensive program in the development of optimum space-time processing (OSTP) and have extended the theory further than has the U.S. Their effort is based on the Karhunen-Loeve expansion extended to nonstationary space-time signals and noise.