In communication, the detection and recognition of digital signals have always faced problems such as low adaptability and high misclassification rate. To address these issues, this study innovatively fused the deep auto-encoder network with convolutional neural networks to construct a novel digital signal detection and recognition model. Firstly, this study utilized the powerful feature extraction capabilities of the deep auto-encoder network to extract key feature information from massive amounts of data. Then these features were combined with convolutional neural networks to construct a detection and recognition model. These results confirmed that the constructed digital signal detection and recognition model had values of 93.75% and 94.18% in data detection recognition rate and average classification accuracy, respectively. Meanwhile, this model also performed well in terms of data processing accuracy and recall. In the comparison of data processing, the accuracy and recall rates were 93.59% and 94.67%, respectively, and the performance of data detection and recognition was better than that of the comparison methods. This indicates that the constructed digital signal detection and recognition model can significantly improve the reliability and robustness of signal detection and recognition. This paper brings new breakthroughs to the development of digital signal detection and recognition technology in communication.