The spread spectrum signal detection problem is examined in colored noise with an unknown covariance matrix. When the receiver is equipped with a symmetrically spaced linear array, persymmetry exists in the received data. We exploit the persymmetric structures to design adaptive detectors according to the principles of generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT), Wald test, and Rao test. It turns out that the proposed GLRT has the same form as the proposed Wald test, and the Rao test does not exist. We prove that the proposed detector exhibits a constant false alarm rate against the unknown noise covariance matrix. Numerical examples demonstrate that the proposed detector has better performance than its non-persymmetric counterpart.

In this paper, four adaptive radar architectures for target detection in heterogeneous Gaussian environments are devised. The first architecture relies on a cyclic optimization exploiting the Maximum Likelihood Approach in the original data domain, whereas the second detector is a function of transformed data which are normalized with respect to their energy and with the unknown parameters estimated through an ExpectationMaximization-based alternate procedure. The remaining two architectures are obtained by suitably combining the estimation procedures and the detector structures previously devised. Performance analysis, conducted on both simulated and measured data, highlights that the architecture working in the transformed domain guarantees the constant false alarm rate property with respect to the interference power variations and a limited detection loss with respect to the other detectors, whose detection thresholds nevertheless are very sensitive to the interference power.