Statistical Performance of Generalized Direction Detectors with Known Spatial Steering Vector

Abstract: The generalized direction detection (GDD) problem involves determining the presence of a signal of interest within matrix-valued data, where the row and column spaces of the signal (if present) are known, but the speciffc coordinates are unknown. Many detectors have been proposed for GDD, yet there is a lack of analytical results regarding their statistical detection performance. This paper presents a theoretical analysis of two adaptive detectors for GDD in scenarios with known spatial steering vectors. Speciffcally, we establish their statistical distributions and develop closed-form expressions for both detection probability (PD) and false alarm probability (PFA). Simulation experiments are carried out to validate the theoretical results, demonstrating good agreement between theoretical and simulated results.