In Cognitive radio networks, spectrum sensing is used to sense the unused spectrum in an opportunistic manner. In this paper, multiple antennas based energy detector utilizing adaptive double-threshold for spectrum sensing is proposed, which enhances detection performance and overcomes sensing failure problem as well. The detection threshold is made adaptive to the fluctuation of the received signal power in each local detector of cognitive radio (CR) user. Numerical results show that by using multiple antennas at the CRs, it is possible to significantly improve detection performance at very low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Further, the scheme was analyzed in conjunction with cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS), where CRs utilize selection combining of the decision statistics obtained by an adaptive double-threshold energy detector for making a binary decision of the presence or absence of a primary user. The decision of each CR is forwarded over error free orthogonal channels to the fusion centre, which takes the final decision of a spectrum hole. It is further found that CSS with multiple antenna-based energy detector with adaptive double-threshold improves detection performance around 26.8 % as compared to hierarchical with quantization method at −12 dB SNR, under the condition that a small number of sensing nodes are used in spectrum sensing.