A comparison of parametric and nonparametric detector performance levels in underwater noise

The aim of the work is to determine and clarify the effects of some typical problems that arise when working with a real‐noise source. To this end, stationarity, time correlation between data samples, and parametric and nonparametric detection for a large segment of Arctic under‐ice noise are examined. In particular, the effect that correlation between samples has on the ability to detect a known signal in additive noise using several different parametric detectors is analyzed. Since most underwater environments are both nonstationary and non‐Gaussian, nonparametric detectors are of interest also. Thus a comparison of the performance levels of several different nonparametric detectors is performed for four common underwater environments.