  This paper proposes a novel, highly effective spectrum sensing algorithm for
cognitive radio and whitespace applications. The proposed spectral covariance
sensing (SCS) algorithm exploits the different statistical correlations of the
received signal and noise in the frequency domain. Test statistics are computed
from the covariance matrix of a partial spectrogram and compared with a
decision threshold to determine whether a primary signal or arbitrary type is
present or not. This detector is analyzed theoretically and verified through
realistic open-source simulations using actual digital television signals
captured in the US. Compared to the state of the art in the literature, SCS
improves sensitivity by 3 dB for the same dwell time, which is a very
significant improvement for this application. Further, it is shown that SCS is
highly robust to noise uncertainty, whereas many other spectrum sensors are
not.
