Aperiodic autocorrelation and crosscorrelation of polyphase sequences

A detailed analysis of the maximum aperiodic autocorrelation of the original Chu sequences (equivalently, P3/P4 pulse compression codes) is presented. The result implies the best known upper bound on the minimax aperiodic autocorrelation for polyphase sequences except when the length is very small or a perfect square. It is well known that determining the minimax aperiodic correlation for polyphase sequence sets is an intractable task. The simplest nontrivial cases for Barker and general polyphase sequences are solved for the first time.