Spectrum sensing has been identified as an essential enabling functionality for cognitive radio (CR) systems to guarantee that CR users could share the spectrum resource with licensed users on a non-interfering basis. Recently, simultaneous sensing of multi-band licensed user activity has been attracting more and more research interest. Generally, the multi-band sensing is implemented through energy detection by estimating power spectral density. In this paper, we investigate a multi-band energy detection architecture based on different polyphase filter banks (PFBs), which aim to reliably sense multiple active bands by exploiting the low power leakage property of PFB. We have theoretically derived the closed-form expressions of detection probability and false alarm probability for PFBs and fast Fourier transform based detectors, respectively. Theoretical detection thresholds are therefore computed, which ensures a fair comparison for different detectors. Final experimental results are presented to verify our theoretical analysis and demonstrate that PFBs based sensing architecture exhibits better sensing performance than the conventional FFT.Spectrum sensing on a single frequency band has a relatively rich literature [29,30]. However, the literature of multi-band sensing that monitors multiple frequency bands simultaneously is very limited. The basic concept of multi-band sensing is to firstly estimate the power spectral density (PSD) and then power detection (which is simple and can locate spectrum occupancy information quickly) is applied in the frequency domain based on the observed power spectrum [31][32][33]. A spectrum sensing algorithm for wideband CR systems was proposed in [34] by exploiting the sensed spectrum discontinuity properties. In [35], a wideband dual-stage sensing technique: a coarse and a fine spectrum sensing architecture was proposed. These two sensing stages collaborate with each other to enhance the accuracy of spectrum sensing performance. In [36], three widely used spectrum estimation methods, weighted overlapped segment averaging approach, multi-taper spectrum estimator, and multiple signal classification algorithm, were introduced and compared for wideband detection. In [37], a novel approach called segmented periodogram for wideband spectrum segmentation was proposed. The proposed scheme is based on the posterior expectation of the piece-wise flat realizations of the underlying signal spectrum, which is obtained using the reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo technique. The authors in [38] considered joint decisions over multiple frequency bands. The spectrum sensing problem is formulated as a class of optimization problems in interference limited cognitive radio networks. The theoretical analysis of spectrum sensing using multitaper spectrum was investigated in [39], where analytic detection probabilities have been derived for multitaper-based detection schemes, which is demonstrated to be more robust to the noise uncertainty compared with energy-based detectors. In [40], the aut...