Efficient and Accurate Frequency Estimator under Low SNR by Phase Unwrapping

In the case of low signal-to-noise ratio, for the frequency estimation of single-frequency sinusoidal signals with additive white Gaussian noise, the phase unwrapping estimator usually performs poorly. In this paper, an efficient and accurate method is proposed to address this problem. Different from other methods, based on fast Fourier transform, the sampled signals are estimated with the variances approaching the Cramer-Rao bound, followed with the maximum likelihood estimation of the frequency. Experimental results reveal that our estimator has a better performance than other phase unwrapping estimators. Compared with the state-of-the-art method, our estimator has the same accuracy and lower computational complexity. Besides, our estimator does not have the estimation bias.