Detection of weak signals in noisy environments is required for a wide variety of applications. On many occasions, signal propagation underwater and in the air will cause corruption and amplitude attenuation due to signal broadening and the effects of the propagation environment. Both underwater and atmospheric environments could be turbulent and cause signal corruption. Moreover, in many instances, the initial signals to detect are weak. Consequently, environmental noise can be very damaging to the detection of such weak signals.
Our group is developing nonlinear methods for detecting weak signals in noisy environments with potential applications to a wide variety of signals such as acoustic, magnetic and optical. These techniques are based on employing several types of nonlinear systems of equations for which, under an appropriate choice of parameters, responses to environmental noise substantially differs from the response when a weak signal is present in addition to noise. This research focuses on numerical and analytical efforts and takes advantage of computational resources that we have in our group. We have submitted a patent application entitled “Detection and Identification of Weak Signals in Noisy Environment”, application number 18/653,408.