Adaptive subspace detectors

We use the theory of generalized likelihood ratio tests (GLRTs) to adapt the matched subspace detectors (MSDs) of Scharf (1991) and of Scharf and Frielander (1994) to unknown noise covariance matrices. In so doing, we produce adaptive MSDs that may be applied to signal detection for radar, sonar, and data communication. We call the resulting detectors adaptive subspace detectors (ASDs). These include Kelly's (1987) GLRT and the adaptive cosine estimator (ACE) of Kaurt and Scharh (see ibid., vol.47, p.2538-41, 1999) and of Scharf and McWhorter (see Proc. 30th Asilomar Conf. Signals, Syst., Comput., Pacific Grove, CA, 1996) for scenarios in which the scaling of the test data may deviate from that of the training data. We then present a unified analysis of the statistical behavior of the entire class of ASDs, obtaining statistically identical decompositions in which each ASD is simply decomposed into the nonadaptive matched filter, the nonadaptive cosine or t-statistic, and three other statistically independent random variables that account for the performance-degrading effects of limited training data.