Method and System for Denoising Amplification of a Signal

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The problem of noise is ubiquitous in fields of science and engineering, ultimately limiting the capability to detect weak signals. In particular, very weak signals can be lost in background noise, at which point conventional (active) amplification methods, where the intensity of a signal is increased by injecting additional energy, fail to properly amplify a noisy signal since the background noise is amplified along with the signal of interest, while also adding additional noise. In this case, noise mitigation techniques must be employed to recover the signal from noise. This is often done using a band-pass filter, which lets only the energy within a particular frequency band go through, whereas the other frequency components are discarded. However, there are two particular regimes that are problematic with this technique: signals that are made up of very few frequencies, corresponding to slow temporal variations (narrowband signals), and signals that are made up of a very large collection of frequencies, corresponding to ultra-fast time varying signals (broadband signals). For the case of narrowband signals, typical band pass filters have a limitation with respect to the minimum width of the pass-band. Therefore, noise mitigation is not optimal since the pass band of the filter cannot match that of the signal of interest. For the case of broadband signals, much of the noise is contained within the frequency band of the signal itself (the so-called in-band noise), such that filtering this noise would lead to a distortion of the signal. The subject of in-band noise mitigation has been a long-lasting problem in the field of signal processing.Here we propose a novel system for denoising amplification of a signal, which can be reconfigured to act either in the temporal domain, where it is appropriate for narrowband signals, or in the spectral domain, where it is appropriate to mitigate in-band noise of broadband signals. The market study will help in identifying the applications of most immediate interest for the proposed technology, i.e., to confirm the specific Canadian and foreign companies we could work with for a technology transfer and commercialization of the technology.