Successful detection of weak signals is a universal challenge for numerous technical and biological systems and crucially limits signal transduction and transmission. Stochastic resonance (SR) has been identified to have the potential to tackle this problem, namely to enable non-linear systems to detect small, otherwise sub-threshold signals by means of added non-zero noise. This has been demonstrated within a wide range of systems in physical, technological and biological contexts. Based on its ubiquitous importance, numerous theoretical and technical approaches aim at an optimization of signal transduction based on SR. Several quantities like mutual information, signal-to-noise-ratio, or the cross-correlation between input stimulus and resulting detector response have been used to determine optimal noise intensities for SR. The fundamental shortcoming with all these measures is that knowledge of the signal to be detected is required to compute them. This dilemma prevents the use of adaptive SR procedures in any application where the signal to be detected is unknown. We here show that the autocorrelation function (AC) of the detector response fundamentally overcomes this drawback. For a simplified model system, the equivalence of the output AC with the measures mentioned above is proven analytically. In addition, we test our approach numerically for a variety of systems comprising different input signals and different types of detectors. The results indicate a strong similarity between mutual information and output AC in terms of the optimal noise intensity for SR. Hence, using the output AC to adaptively vary the amount of added noise in order to maximize information transmission via SR might be a fundamental processing principle in nature, in particular within neural systems which could be implemented in future technical applications.