Echoformer: Transformer Architecture Based on Radar Echo Characteristics for UAV Detection

Abstract

While recent years have witnessed an increasing number of commercial applications of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), an imperative problem people have to face is the rapid growth of malicious use. So, it is imperative for security agencies to develop anti-UAV technology. The introduction of deep learning (DL) has a positive influence on radar signal processing, but DL-based methodologies have yet to be widespread in radar target detection because of the lack of unique architecture based on radar echo characteristics and the annotation method of radar data. In this article, a novel Transformer-based architecture is proposed, which transforms the problem of UAV detection into a binary classification task in each range cell. The complex encoder architecture and the Transformer-based extractor are designed to extract the Doppler frequency shift feature and the micro-Doppler signature (mDS) of a UAV simultaneously. The well-designed architecture based on radar echo characteristics can achieve a combination training of echoes with different coherent processing intervals (CPIs). In addition, we provide an annotation method and a data augmentation skill for our real measured dataset. The results of the experiment demonstrate that the proposed method has better detection performance and measuring accuracy under different SNRs in comparison with traditional radar target detection and other DL-based methods.