Adaptive pre-whiten filtering for the free induction decay transversal signal in weak magnetic detection

The free induction decay (FID) transversal signal is always employed by a proton precession magnetometer (PPM) to evaluate the time-domain geomagnetic field. Nevertheless, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is an important factor that severely affects the detection accuracy of the magnetic field due to uncontrollable interference sources, including random noise and power frequency noise. In this study, aiming to boost the SNR of the FID transversal signal, a novel filtering algorithm based on a prewhiten (PW) strategy is proposed and the PW filtering was combined with singular value decomposition (SVD) for further noise reduction. This method aims to generate adaptive PW input data before filtering, further decorrelating the noise to reduce the impact of varying noise levels in the received FID signals. The efficiency of the proposed joint filtering framework, dubbed PW-SVD, was evaluated by comparing with two state-of-the-art methods, i.e., SVD and principal component analysis and decomposition, using the same data. The results demonstrated that the proposed PW-SVD method obtained the smallest root mean square error and the highest signal-to-noise ratio improvement among all the compared methods, especially for the strong-noisy scenario, which enhances the environmental adaptability of a PPM.The free induction decay (FID) transversal signal is always employed by a proton precession magnetometer (PPM) to evaluate the time-domain geomagnetic field. Nevertheless, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is an important factor that severely affects the detection accuracy of the magnetic field due to uncontrollable interference sources, including random noise and power frequency noise. In this study, aiming to boost the SNR of the FID transversal signal, a novel filtering algorithm based on a prewhiten (PW) strategy is proposed and the PW filtering was combined with singular value decomposition (SVD) for further noise reduction. This method aims to generate adaptive PW input data before filtering, further decorrelating the noise to reduce the impact of varying noise levels in the received FID signals. The efficiency of the proposed joint filtering framework, dubbed PW-SVD, was evaluated by comparing with two state-of-the-art methods, i.e., SVD and principal component analysis and decomposition, using the s...