Without conceding a blemish in the first edition, I think I had best come clean
and admit that I embarked on a second edition largely to adopt a more geometric
approach to the detection of signals in white Gaussian noise. Equally rigorous, yet
more intuitive, this approach is not only student-friendly, but also extends more
easily to the detection problem with random parameters and to the radar problem
Homogeneous Partitioning of the Surveillance Volume discusses the
implementation of the first of three sequentially complementary approaches for
increasing the probability of target detection within at least some of the cells of
the surveillance volume for a spatially nonGaussian or Gaussian “noise”
environment that is temporally Gaussian. This approach, identified in the Preface
as Approach A, partitions the surveillance volume into homogeneous contiguous
subdivisions.
This book is a result of the recent rapid advances in two related technologies: com-
munications and computers. Over the past few decades, communication systems
have increased in complexity to the point where system design and performance
analysis can no longer be conducted without a significant level of computer sup-
port. Many of the communication systems of fifty years ago were either power or
noise limited. A significant degrading effect in many of these systems was thermal
noise, which was modeled using the additive Gaussian noise channel.
