Complementary Intermittently Nonlinear Filtering for Mitigation of Hidden Outlier Interference

When interference affecting various communication and sensor systems contains clearly identifiable outliers (e.g. an impulsive component), it can be efficiently mitigated in real time by intermittently nonlinear filters developed in our earlier work, achieving improvements in the signal quality otherwise unattainable. However, apparent amplitude outliers in the interference can disappear and reappear due to various filtering effects, including fading and multipath, as the signal propagates through media and/or the signal processing chain. In addition, the outlier structure of the interference can be obscured by strong non-outlier interfering signals, such as thermal noise and/or adjacent channel interference, or by the signal of interest itself. In this paper, we first outline the overall approach to using intermittently nonlinear filters for in-band, real-time mitigation of such interference with hidden outlier components in practical complex interference scenarios. We then introduce Complementary Intermittently Nonlinear Filters (CINFs) and focus on the particular task of mitigating the outlier noise obscured by the signal of interest itself. We describe practical implementations of such nonlinear filtering arrangements for mitigation of hidden outlier interference, in the process of analog-to-digital conversion, for wide ranges of interference powers and the rates of outlier generating events. To emphasize the effectiveness and versatility of this approach, in our examples we use particularly challenging waveforms, encountered in military communications, that severely obscure low-amplitude outlier noise, such as broadband chirp signals (e.g. used in radar, sonar, and spread-spectrum communications) and “bursty,” high crest factor signals (e.g. OFDM).