Detection in multiple disparate systems using multi-channel coherence analysis

This paper presents a coherence-based detection method for multiple disparate sensing systems using the multi-channel coherence analysis (MCA) framework. MCA provides an optimal coordinate system for multi-channel detection problems as it finds sets of one-dimensional mapping vectors that maximize the sum of the cross-correlations among all pair-wise combinations of channels. The standard detector for Gaussian random vectors is then cast into the MCA framework by developing the log-likelihood ratio and J-divergence measure. The proposed detection method is then tested on a data set consisting of sets of four side-scan sonar images coregistered over the same region on the seafloor and the results are compared with those of a multi-channel generalized likelihood ratio (GLR) detector.