Patent ID: 7523014

Claim:
A method for facilitating high-sensitivity detection of an anomaly in a signal, wherein the signal is sampled to produce a set of possible quantized signal values, the method comprising: constructing a reference distribution for an occurrence frequency of a specific quantized signal value from the set of possible quantized signal values; obtaining a deviant distribution associated with the reference distribution, wherein the deviant distribution has an offset from the reference distribution to indicate an anomaly in the signal; in response to a new occurrence of the specific quantized signal value, updating mean and variance of the reference distribution for the specific quantized signal value; and adjusting a mean (M 1 ) of the deviant distribution for the specific quantized signal value based on the updated mean (M 0 ) and the updated variance (σ 2 ) of the reference distribution for the specific quantized signal value according to an expression M 1 =M 0 ±ƒ(σ 2 ), wherein ƒ(σ 2 ) is a strictly-increasing non-negative function of σ 2 ; wherein adjusting the deviant distribution in this way reduces the offset between the reference distribution and the deviant distribution, thereby increasing system sensitivity while subsequently detecting an anomaly in the signal.