Peterson & Birdsall (1953), University of Michigan Engineering Research Institute, Electronic Defense Group, Technical Report No. 13 (Project M970; Signal Corps contract DA-36-039 sc-15358), Part I June 1953 (DTIC AD0016786), Part II July 1953 (DTIC AD0016787); read from the DTIC scans mirrored at archive.org/details/DTIC_AD0016786 and archive.org/details/DTIC_AD0016787. Journal version, with W. C. Fox as third author and not read here: “The theory of signal detectability”, Transactions of the IRE Professional Group on Information Theory 4(4):171–212, September 1954, doi:10.1109/TIT.1954.1057460 — https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/7068
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-09-30 at the owner’s request, as one of the sources registered to cover signal detection theory,
which the record lacked; its only detection-theory entry, Van Trees 1968 (LIT-351), is unreachable.
published: is the first appearance (ADR-002).
It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-315 is the close reading of 2026-09-30, and it placed the work: Active — worth reading as the founding engineering statement of signal detection theory: the likelihood-ratio receiver, the ROC and its slope property, and the equal-variance Gaussian case with an explicit d = 2E/N₀. Read the 1953 report knowing that the scan is poor and that the 1954 IRE paper (with W. C. Fox) is the citable journal form, which was not read here.