Adaptive sparse signal processing of satellite-based radio frequency (RF) recordings of lightning events

Abstract

Ongoing research at Los Alamos National Laboratory studies the Earth’s radio frequency (RF) background utilizing satellite-based RF observations of terrestrial lightning. Such impulsive events are dispersed through the ionosphere and appear as broadband nonlinear chirps at a receiver on-orbit. They occur in the presence of additive noise and structured clutter, making their classification challenging. The Fast On-orbit Recording of Transient Events (FORTE) satellite provided a rich RF lightning database. Application of modern pattern recognition techniques to this database may further lightning research in the scientific community, and potentially improve on-orbit processing and event discrimination capabilities for future satellite payloads. Conventional feature extraction techniques using analytical dictionaries, such as a short-time Fourier basis or wavelets, are not comprehensively suitable for analyzing the broadband RF pulses under consideration here. We explore an alternative approach based on non-analytical dictionaries learned directly from data, and extend two dictionary learning algorithms, K-SVD and Hebbian, for use with satellite RF data. Both algorithms allow us to learn features without relying on analytical constraints or additional knowledge about the expected signal characteristics. We then use a pursuit search over the learned dictionaries to generate sparse classification features, and discuss their performance in terms of event classification. We also use principal component analysis to analyze and compare the respective learned dictionary spaces to the real data space.