Computational Complexity of Subspace Detectors and Matched Field Processing

Subspace detectors implement a correlation type calculation on a continuous (network or array) data stream [Harris, 2006]. The difference between subspace detectors and correlators is that the former projects the data in a sliding observation window onto a basis of template waveforms that may have a dimension (d) greater than one, and the latter projects the data onto a single waveform template. A standard correlation detector can be considered to be a degenerate (d=1) form of a subspace detector. Figure 1 below shows a block diagram for the standard formulation of a subspace detector. The detector consists of multiple multichannel correlators operating on a continuous data stream. The correlation operations are performed with FFTs in an overlap-add approach that allows the stream to be processed in uniform, consecutive, contiguous blocks. Figure 1 is slightly misleading for a calculation of computational complexity, as it is possible, when treating all channels with the same weighting (as shown in the figure), to perform the indicated summations in the multichannel correlators before the inverse FFTs and to get by with a single inverse FFT and overlap add calculation per multichannel correlator. In what follows, we make this simplification