HIGH-ORDER YULE-WALKER ESTIMATION OF THE PARAMETERS OF EXPONENTIALLY DAMPED CISOIDS IN NOISE

An approach for the estimation of the frequencies and damping factors of exponentially damped cisoids (complex sinusoids) is presented. The method may be seen as an extension of the method of backward linear prediction and singular value decomposition of Kumaresan and Tufts to the second-order statistics domain. The proposed estimator is interpreted as a high-order Yule-Walker (HOYW) method using a data based covariance matrix. The HOYW method is analysed at high SNR where closed-form expressions for the accuracy of the estimates are derived. By Monte Carlo simulations the HOYW method is applied to data consisting of one and two damped cisoids in additive white noise. The simulation results are compared with the results using the Kumaresan and Tufts method, with the Cramer-Rao bound, and with the derived theoretical results. The method is not statistically efficient, but the comparison shows that the HOYW method outperforms the method of Kumaresan and Tufts in terms of accuracy versus algorithmic complexity and in terms of precision in the cases considered. Due to the above properties the method is suitable to provide fast initial estimates for nonlinear search methods.