A blind multipath equalizer for a digital communication channel is disclosed. The equalizer includes a sparse digital filter, responsive to a source of a received signal including a digital data signal, and including a plurality of taps, each responsive to a tap coefficient and time displacement, which produces a multipath corrected digital output signal. A filter controller is responsive to the received signal for detecting a multipath signal by calculating the autocorrelation of the received signal, detecting a multipath signal based on the autocorrelation and supplying a tap coefficient and time displacement to one of the plurality of taps to cancel the detected multipath signal.