  The spectral line datacubes obtained from the Square Kilometre Array (SKA)
and its precursors, such as the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP), will be
sufficiently large to necessitate automated detection and parametrisation of
sources. Matched filtering is widely acknowledged as the best possible method
for the automated detection of sources. This paper presents the Characterised
Noise Hi (CNHI) source finder, which employs a novel implementation of matched
filtering. This implementation is optimised for the 3-D nature of the planned
Wide-field ASKAP Legacy L-band All- sky Blind surveY's (WALLABY) Hi spectral
line observations. The CNHI source finder also employs a novel sparse
representation of 3-D objects, with a high compression rate, to implement Lutz
one-pass algorithm on datacubes that are too large to process in a single pass.
WALLABY will use ASKAP's phenomenal 30 square degree field of view to image
\sim 70% of the sky. It is expected that WALLABY will find 500 000 Hi galaxies
out to z \sim 0.2.
