On the efficient frequency estimation of a single tone

The frequency estimation of a single tone corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise has received significant attention over the last decades due to its wide applicability in signal processing. In this paper, we propose a computationally fast and statistically improved hybrid single tone estimator which outperforms other recently proposed approaches, lowering the signal-to-noise ratio at which the Cram´er-Rao lower bound is closely followed. Numerical simulations indicate that, in contrast to many other techniques, the performance of the hybrid estimator is essentially independent of the underlying frequency component.