Subspace Partitioning for Target Detection and Identification

Detection of a given target or set of targets from observed data is a problem countered in many applications. Regardless of the algorithm selected, detection performance can be severely degraded when the subspace defined by the target data set is singular or ill conditioned. High correlations between target components and their linear combinations lead to false positives and misidentifications, especially for subspace-based detectors. In this paper, we propose a subspace partitioning scheme that allows for detection to be performed in a number of better conditioned subspaces instead of the original subspace. The proposed technique is applied to Raman spectroscopic data analysis. Through both simulation and experimental results, we demonstrate the improvement in the overall detection performance when using the proposed subspace partitioning scheme in conjunction with several subspace detection methods that are commonly used in practice.