Patent ID: 8676523

Claim:
A method of detecting the position of a wavefront reflecting the occurrence of a looked-for event in a time-varying signal received by a detector, the method comprising: digitizing the signal received by the detector to produce a working signal; filtering the working signal N4 times, where N4 is an integer greater than or equal to 3 with a band-pass filter while varying the width of the pass-band of the band-pass filter N4 times to generate N4 pass-bands to obtain N4 filtered working signals, the N4 pass-bands being contained one within another from the widest to the narrowest pass-band; processing each of the N4 filtered working signals using a peak detection method to detect in each N4 filtered working signal the position of a first wavefront as a time of occurrence; associating the width of the pass-band for each of the corresponding N4 filtered working signal with each corresponding time of occurrence; defining N4 points each having an ordinate corresponding to one of the times of occurrence and an abscissa corresponding to the width of the associated band; plotting the N4 points in a Cartesian system of axes; and searching for an exponential asymptote that fits a maximum number of the N4 points, the position of the wavefront reflecting the occurrence of the looked-for event being the ordinate of a point that has the largest abscissa and that is substantially on the exponential asymptote.