A global lower bound on parameter estimation error with periodic distortion functions

We present a global Ziv-Zakai (1969) type lower bound on the mean square error for estimation of signal parameter vectors, where some components of the distortion function may be periodic. Periodic distortion functions arise naturally in the context of direction of arrival or phase estimation problems. The bound is applied to an image registration problem, and compared to the performance of the maximum-likelihood estimator (MLE).