Detection with target-induced subspace interference

In this letter, we consider the detection of a multichannel signal with an unknown amplitude in colored noise, when there is a covariance mismatch between the null and alternative hypotheses. Specifically, the covariance mismatch is caused by a target-induced subspace interference that is present only under the alternative hypothesis. According to the signal model, we propose a detector involving the following steps. The observation is first projected to the orthogonal complement of the signal to be detected, followed by a second projection to the interference subspace. Then, the energy of the doubly projected signal (residual) is computed. If the residual energy is small, the proposed detector reduces to the standard matched filter (MF), which ignores the subspace interference; otherwise, a modified test statistic is employed for additional interference cancellation. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed detector.