Polynomial phase estimation by least squares phase unwrapping

Estimating the coefficients of a noisy polynomial phase signal is important in fields including radar, biology and radio communications. One approach attempts to perform polynomial regression on the phase of the signal. This is complicated by the fact that the phase is wrapped modulo 2π and must be unwrapped before regression can be performed. In this paper, we consider an estimator that performs phase unwrapping in a least squares manner. We call this the least squares unwrapping (LSU) estimator. The LSU estimator can be computed in a reasonable amount of time for data sets of moderate size using existing general purpose algorithms from algebraic number theory. Under mild conditions on the distribution of the noise we describe the asymptotic properties of this estimator, showing that it is strongly consistent and asymptotically normally distributed. A key feature is that the LSU estimator is accurate over a far wider range of parameters than many popular existing estimators. Monte-Carlo simulations support our theoretical results and demonstrate the excellent statistical performance of the LSU estimator when compared with existing state-of-the-art estimators.