Passive detection of rank-one signals with a multiantenna reference channel

In this work we consider a two-channel passive detection problem, in which there is a surveillance array where the presence/absence of a target signal is to be detected, and a reference array that provides a noise-contaminated version of the target signal. We assume that the transmitted signal is an unknown rank-one signal, and that the noises are uncorrelated between the two channels, but each one having an unknown and arbitrary spatial covariance matrix. We show that the generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) for this problem rejects the null hypothesis when the largest canonical correlation of the sample coherence matrix between the surveillance and the reference channels exceeds a threshold. Further, based on recent results from random matrix theory, we provide an approximation for the null distribution of the test statistic.