Normalized parametric adaptive matched filter receiver

The invention described herein may be manufactured and used by or for the US Government for governmental purposes without the payment of any royalty thereon. Disclosed is an apparatus and method for improving the detection of signals obscured by either correlated Gaussian or non-Gaussian noise plus additive white noise. Estimates from multichannel data of model parameters that describe the noise disturbance correlation are obtained from data that contain signal-free data vectors, referred to as "secondary" or "reference" cell data. These parameters form the coefficients of a multichannel whitening filter. A data vector to be tested for the presence of a signal passes through the multichannel whitening filter. The filter output is then processed to form a test statistic. The test statistic is compared to a threshold value to decide whether a signal is "present" or "absent." The method is effective in detecting targets without knowledge of the non-Gaussian noise statistics.