On the improvability and nonimprovability of detection via additional independent noise

Addition of independent noise to measurements can improve performance of some suboptimal detectors under certain conditions. In this letter, sufficient conditions under which the performance of a suboptimal detector cannot be enhanced by additional independent noise are derived according to the Neyman–Pearson criterion. Also, sufficient conditions are obtained to specify when the detector performance can be improved. In addition to a generic condition, various explicit sufficient conditions are proposed for easy evaluation of improvability. Finally, a numerical example is presented and the practicality of the proposed conditions is discussed.