Multi-feature fusion for specific emitter identification via deep ensemble learning

Abstract

Specific emitter identification (SEI) is an important problem in the field of electronic intelligence. There are two major limitations in most existing SEI methods: First, the features should be artificially extracted, which requires specialized expertise; Second, various features are not merged effectively to improve performance. In this paper, an automatic multi-feature extraction and fusion method based on deep ensemble learning is proposed for SEI. This method extracts and fuses multiple features via data-driven strategies using convolutional neural networks (CNN). No additional constraints are required on the type and number of the features to be fused. Three typical characteristics of radar pulse signals, including amplitude, phase and spectrum asymmetry, are taken as example features for method description and performance verification. Experiment results demonstrate that, the proposed method performs well in automatic feature extraction, and it can significantly improve the SEI performance via multi-feature fusion.