A dichotomous search-based frequency estimator with generic analytical expression

Fine resolution frequency estimation of a single-tone complex sinusoidal signal in the additive white Gaussian noise is of importance in many fields. In this paper, a generic analytical expression is proposed to refine the residual of a dichotomous search, leading to an estimator with much less iterations than the conventional dichotomous search estimator. Compared with other existing estimators, the proposed estimator has a better trade-off between performance and computational complexity. Simulation results demonstrate that the root-mean-square error (RMSE) of the proposed estimator is closer to the Cramer–Rao lower bound (CRLB) than other estimators over the whole frequency interval when the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is above a threshold.