A radio is adaptive if it can autonomously analyze the communications environment and instantly modify its settings to achieve the best possible efficiency. In orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmissions, identifying the space frequency block coding (SFBC) category utilized is one of the most important tasks of an adaptive receiver. Previous approaches to this problem did not take into consideration the fact that real systems typically suffer from transmission defects. This study offers a novel maximum likelihood recognizer capable of distinguishing between SFBC OFDM waveforms in the context of inphase and quadrature phase differences (IQDs). The theoretical findings show that IQDs arising from the transmitter and recipient can be combined with channel paths to generate so-called effective channel paths. The conceptual examination demonstrates that the outlined maximum likelihood strategy of the SFBC recognition and effective channel estimation processes is implemented by an expectation maximization tool utilizing the error control decoders’ soft outputs. The simulations results reveal that the suggested strategy delivers a much greater recognition accuracy than the typical approaches outlined in the comparable literature. At a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 14 dB, for example, the proposed approach achieves a bit error rate (BER) of 0.00002, which is very close to the case of perfect estimation and compensation for IQDs, outperforming the previous reported works which achieved BERs of 0.01 and 0.02.