Signal sequence detection techniques are provided to enable a wireless communication device to detect presence of a sequence, such as a preamble sequence, in the presence of other transmission that would otherwise interference with the ability of the device to detect the sequence. At the wireless communication device, energy in a frequency band is received and a receive signal is generated from the received energy. The receive signal is divided into windows of a predetermined time duration. A running auto-correlation of the receive signal is computed to produce an auto-correlation sequence for a sequence to be detected in the receive signal. Data representing a mask is generated for a window based on the receive signal. The mask is applied to the auto-correlation sequence to filter out portions of the auto-correlation sequence that are outside of the mask. A position of sequence, e.g., a preamble sequence, in the receive signal is detected based on a position of a peak in the auto-correlation sequence after application of the mask.