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The low intensity of the X-ray pulsar signal and the strong X-ray background radiation lead to low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the X-ray pulsar observed profile obtained through epoch folding, especially when the observation time is not long enough. This signifies the necessity of denoising of the observed profile. In this paper, the statistical characteristics of the X-ray pulsar signal are studied, and a signal-dependent noise model is established for the observed profile. Based on this, a profile noise reduction method by performing a local linear minimum mean square error filtering in the un-decimated wavelet domain is developed. The detail wavelet coefficients are rescaled by multiplying their amplitudes by a locally adaptive factor, which is the local variance ratio of the noiseless coefficients to the noisy ones. All the nonstationary statistics needed in the algorithm are calculated from the observed profile, without a priori information. The results of experiments, carried out on simulated data obtained by the ground-based simulation system and real data obtained by Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer satellite, indicate that the proposed method is excellent in both noise suppression and preservation of peak sharpness, and it also clearly outperforms four widely accepted and used wavelet denoising methods, in terms of SNR, Pearson correlation coefficient and root mean square error. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a timing solution for the X-ray pulsar timing model without the use of the initial radio model parameters. First, we address the problem of phase ambiguities for the pre-fit residuals in the construction of pulsar timing model. To improve the estimation accuracy of the pulse time of arrival (TOA), we have deduced the general form of test statistics in Fourier transform, and discussed their estimation performances. Meanwhile, a fast maximum likelihood (FML) technique is presented to estimate the pulse TOA, which outperforms cross correlation (CC) estimator and exhibits a performance comparable with maximum likelihood (ML) estimator in spite of a much less reduced computational complexity. Depending on the strategy of the difference minimum of pre-fit residuals, we present an effective forced phase-connected technique to achieve initial model parameters. Then, we use the observations with the Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) and X-ray pulsar navigation-I (XPNAV-1) satellites for experimental studies, and discuss main differences for the root mean square (RMS) residuals calculated with the X-ray and radio ephemerides. Finally, a chi-square value (CSV) of pulse profiles is presented as a complementary indicator to the RMS residuals for evaluating the model parameters. The results show that the proposed timing solution is valid and effective, and the obtained model parameters can be a reasonable alternative to the radio ephemeris. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]