In non-cooperative communication systems, the effective recognition by intercepted bitstream at the 3rd-party receiver is an important mission for military or security purposes. However, the existing recognition schemes lead to long latency and significant hardware due to the large number of traversal operations. Hence, the spectra update algorithm (SUA) is proposed by analyzing the differences between the adjacent reconstructed matrices. Compared with the spectra calculations available like the Galois field Fourier transform (GFFT) and simplified-GFFT (S-GFFT), the presented algorithm reduces the computational complexity to 2/ <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">n</i> and 2/λ without performance loss, respectively, where <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">n</i> is the code length and λ is the cardinality of the conjugacy class of the corresponding Galois fields. Besides, a reduced-complexity RS recognizer architecture is designed and analyzed to show the effectiveness of the proposed SUA.