Structure-Aware Matrix Pencil Method

We address the problem of detecting the number of complex exponentials and estimating their parameters from a noisy signal using the Matrix Pencil (MP) method. We introduce the MP modes and present their informative spectral structure. We show theoretically that these modes can be divided into signal and noise modes, where the signal modes exhibit a perturbed Vandermonde structure. Leveraging this structure, we proposed a new MP algorithm, termed the SAMP algorithm, which has two novel components. First, we present a new and robust model order detection with theoretical guarantees. Second, we present an efficient estimation of signal amplitudes. We show empirically that the SAMP algorithm significantly outperforms the standard MP method, particularly in challenging conditions with closely-spaced frequencies and low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) values, approaching the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRB) for a broad SNR range. Additionally, compared with prevalent information-based criteria, we show that SAMP is more computationally efficient and insensitive to noise distribution.