A discrete linear stationary system is considered for which the input noise covariance

and the output noise covariance

are unknown. A stable filter with a suboptimal gain is assumed. An identification scheme is presented which uses the autocorrelation functions of the innovations sequence of the suboptimal filter to determine the optimum filter steady state gain

directly without the intermediate determination of the unknown covariances

and

. The approach used is to identify an output equivalent representation of the original system which does not involve the unknown covariances directly.