Stochastic resonance in locally optimal detectors

The aim of this paper is to show that the nonlinear effect known as stochastic resonance, which corresponds to the improvement of the processing of information by noise, occurs naturally in some detection problems. We illustrate this by studying the problem of detecting a small amplitude sinusoid in non-Gaussian noise. We show that in some cases, the nonlinearity that appears in locally optimal detectors can be viewed as a stochastic resonator. If the parameters of the locally optimal detector (LOD) are not well tuned, the performance can be improved by the addition of noise.