A comparison of the resonance annihilation filter (RAF) method and the extinction pulse (E-pulse) technique for radar target discrimination is presented in this paper. It is theoretically demonstrated that the RAF synthesized using finite impulse-response digital filters is a particular forced E-pulse waveform expanded using impulse-basis functions. This fact reveals the RAF method to be a very poor technique for discrimination in a noisy environment. Improvement is possible with suitable data windowing equivalent to using E-pulse waveforms synthesized with continuous and smooth basis functions. Numerical simulations are employed to compare the two techniques when different levels of additive white Gaussian noise are present in the target response. This comparison shows that the use of the Gaussian window originally proposed in the RAF method produces results comparable to rectangular E-pulses. However, these results can be improved by the introduction of alternative smoothing windows or subsectional-polynomial E-pulses. ¿ 1999 American Geophysical Union