Radar Emitter Signals Research Articles

Emitter Signal Deinterleaving Based on Single PDW with Modulation-Hypothesis-Augmented Transformer

Radar emitter signal deinterleaving based on pulse description words (PDWs) is a challenging task in the field of electronic warfare because of the parameter sparsity and uncertainty of PDWs. In this paper, a modulation-hypothesis-augmented Transformer model is proposed to identify emitters from a single PDW with an end-to-end manner. Firstly, the pulse features are enriched by the modulation hypothesis mechanism to generate I/Q complex signals from PDWs. Secondly, a multiple-parameter embedding method is proposed to expand the signal discriminative features and to enhance the identification capability of emitters. Moreover, a novel Transformer deep learning model, named PulseFormer and composed of spectral convolution, multi-layer perceptron, and self-attention based basic blocks, is proposed for discriminative feature extraction, emitter identification, and signal deinterleaving. Experimental results on synthesized PDW dataset show that the proposed method performs better on emitter signal deinterleaving in complex environments without relying on the pulse repetition interval (PRI). Compared with other deep learning methods, the PulseFormer performs better in noisy environments.

The Research of Intra-Pulse Modulated Signal Recognition of Radar Emitter under Few-Shot Learning Condition Based on Multimodal Fusion

Radar radiation source recognition is critical for the reliable operation of radar communication systems. However, in increasingly complex electromagnetic environments, traditional identification methods face significant limitations. These methods often struggle with high noise levels and diverse modulation types, making it difficult to maintain accuracy, especially when the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) is low or the available training data are limited. These difficulties are further intensified by the necessity to generalize in environments characterized by a substantial quantity of noisy, low-quality signal samples while being constrained by a limited number of desirable high-quality training samples. To more effectively address these issues, this paper proposes a novel approach utilizing Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) to enhance model adaptability in few-shot learning scenarios, allowing the model to quickly learn with limited data and optimize parameters effectively. Furthermore, a multimodal fusion neural network, DCFANet, is designed, incorporating residual blocks, squeeze and excitation blocks, and a multi-scale CNN, to fuse I/Q waveform data and time–frequency image data for more comprehensive feature extraction. Our model enables more robust signal recognition, even when the signal quality is severely degraded by noise or when only a few examples of a signal type are available. Testing on 13 intra-pulse modulated signals in an Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) environment across SNRs ranging from −20 to 10 dB demonstrated the approach’s effectiveness. Particularly, under a 5−way5−shot setting, the model achieves high classification accuracy even at −10dB SNR. Our research underscores the model’s ability to address the key challenges of radar emitter signal recognition in low-SNR and data-scarce conditions, demonstrating its strong adaptability and effectiveness in complex, real-world electromagnetic environments.

A Denoising Method Based on DDPM for Radar Emitter Signal Intra-Pulse Modulation Classification

A Denoising Method Based on DDPM for Radar Emitter Signal Intra-Pulse Modulation Classification

1D-CNN-Transformer for Radar Emitter Identification and Implemented on FPGA

Deep learning has brought great development to radar emitter identification technology. In addition, specific emitter identification (SEI), as a branch of radar emitter identification, has also benefited from it. However, the complexity of most deep learning algorithms makes it difficult to adapt to the requirements of the low power consumption and high-performance processing of SEI on embedded devices, so this article proposes solutions from the aspects of software and hardware. From the software side, we design a Transformer variant network, lightweight convolutional Transformer (LW-CT) that supports parameter sharing. Then, we cascade convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and the LW-CT to construct a one-dimensional-CNN-Transformer(1D-CNN-Transformer) lightweight neural network model that can capture the long-range dependencies of radar emitter signals and extract signal spatial domain features meanwhile. In terms of hardware, we design a low-power neural network accelerator based on an FPGA to complete the real-time recognition of radar emitter signals. The accelerator not only designs high-efficiency computing engines for the network, but also devises a reconfigurable buffer called “Ping-pong CBUF” and two-level pipeline architecture for the convolution layer for alleviating the bottleneck caused by the off-chip storage access bandwidth. Experimental results show that the algorithm can achieve a high recognition performance of SEI with a low calculation overhead. In addition, the hardware acceleration platform not only perfectly meets the requirements of the radar emitter recognition system for low power consumption and high-performance processing, but also outperforms the accelerators in other papers in terms of the energy efficiency ratio of Transformer layer processing.

Dual-Branch feature fusion residual neural network for individual radar signal recognition in low SNR environments

Abstract To address the challenge of radar emitter signal individual recognition, where single-dimensional radar fingerprint features are susceptible to noise interference and neural networks exhibit low recognition accuracy in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) environments, this study introduces a residual neural network predicated on a two-branch feature fusion. This approach amalgamates two-dimensional time-frequency domain features with one-dimensional intermediate-frequency signal features. Unlike existing algorithms, our proposed method integrates the knowledge gleaned from features learned across different dimensions. This integration enables the neural network to utilize features from multiple dimensions for recognition, thereby mitigating the impact of noise on a single feature. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm outperforms others under various low SNRs, achieving an average recognition rate of 88.39%.

TR-RAGCN-AFF-RESS: A Method for Radar Emitter Signal Sorting

Radar emitter signal sorting (RESS) is a crucial process in contemporary electronic battlefield situation awareness. Separating pulses belonging to the same radar emitter from interleaved radar pulse sequences with a lack of prior information, high density, strong overlap, and wide parameter distribution has attracted increasing attention. In order to improve the accuracy of RESS under scenarios with limited labeled samples, this paper proposes an RESS model called TR-RAGCN-AFF-RESS. This model transforms the RESS problem into a pulse-by-pulse classification task. Firstly, a novel weighted adjacency matrix construction method was proposed to characterize the structural relationships between pulse attribute parameters more accurately. Building upon this foundation, two networks were developed: a Transformer(TR)-based interleaved pulse sequence temporal feature extraction network and a residual attention graph convolutional network (RAGCN) for extracting the structural relationship features of attribute parameters. Finally, the attention feature fusion (AFF) algorithm was introduced to fully integrate the temporal features and attribute parameter structure relationship features, enhancing the richness of feature representation for the original pulses and achieving more accurate sorting results. Compared to existing deep learning-based RESS algorithms, this method does not require many labeled samples for training, making it better suited for scenarios with limited labeled sample availability. Experimental results and analysis confirm that even with only 10% of the training samples, this method achieves a sorting accuracy exceeding 93.91%, demonstrating high robustness against measurement errors, lost pulses, and spurious pulses in non-ideal conditions.

Efficient FPGA Implementation of Convolutional Neural Networks and Long Short-Term Memory for Radar Emitter Signal Recognition

In recent years, radar emitter signal recognition has enjoyed a wide range of applications in electronic support measure systems and communication security. More and more deep learning algorithms have been used to improve the recognition accuracy of radar emitter signals. However, complex deep learning algorithms and data preprocessing operations have a huge demand for computing power, which cannot meet the requirements of low power consumption and high real-time processing scenarios. Therefore, many research works have remained in the experimental stage and cannot be actually implemented. To tackle this problem, this paper proposes a resource reuse computing acceleration platform based on field programmable gate arrays (FPGA), and implements a one-dimensional (1D) convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network (NN) model for radar emitter signal recognition, directly targeting the intermediate frequency (IF) data of radar emitter signal for classification and recognition. The implementation of the 1D-CNN-LSTM neural network on FPGA is realized by multiplexing the same systolic array to accomplish the parallel acceleration of 1D convolution and matrix vector multiplication operations. We implemented our network on Xilinx XCKU040 to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed solution. Our experiments show that the system can achieve 7.34 giga operations per second (GOPS) data throughput with only 5.022 W power consumption when the radar emitter signal recognition rate is 96.53%, which greatly improves the energy efficiency ratio and real-time performance of the radar emitter recognition system.

Radar Emitter Signal Intra-Pulse Modulation Open Set Recognition Based on Deep Neural Network

Radar emitter signal intra-pulse modulation recognition is important for modern electronic reconnaissance systems to analyze target radar systems. In the actual environment, the intra-pulse modulations of the sampled radar emitter signals contain not only the known types in the library but also the unknown types. Therefore, the existing recognition methods, which are based on a closed set, cannot recognize the unknown samples. In order to solve this problem, in this paper, we proposed a method for radar emitter signal intra-pulse modulation open set recognition. The proposed method could classify the known modulations and identify the unknown modulation by using an original deep neural network-based recognition model trained on a closed set, estimating the signal-to-noise ratio, and calculating the reconstruction loss by an encoder–decoder model. For a given sample, the original deep neural network-based recognition model will label it as a certain known class temporarily. By estimating the SNR of the sample and calculating the reconstruction loss by inputting the sample to the corresponding encoder–decoder model related to the temporary predicted known class, whether the sample belongs to the predicted temporary known class or the unknown class will be confirmed. Experiments were conducted with five different openness conditions. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method has good performance on radar emitter signal intra-pulse modulation open set recognition.

Radar emitter signal recognition method based on improved collaborative semi-supervised learning

Radar emitter signal recognition method based on improved collaborative semi-supervised learning

Radar specific emitter identification via the Attention-GRU model

In radar specific emitter identification (SEI), various types of unintentional modulation on pulse (UMOP) are selected as the features for discriminating between different radars. Unintentional Phase Modulation on Pulse (UPMOP), a typical type of UMOP, can provide crucial information for identifying radars. In most radar SEI algorithms, sacrificing time efficiency for higher accuracy is a common trade-off. This paper proposes a method to solve this problem by combining denoised UPMOP sequences with an Attention-based Gated Recurrent Units (Attention-GRU) model, which showed an excellent performance. Firstly, the cause of UPMOP is analyzed and the phase observation model of radar emitter signals and mathematical model of UPMOP are given. Then, the least-squares method is used to eliminate the linear trend of the phase observation model and obtain a noised estimation of the UPMOP sequences. Thirdly, the uniform B-spline (UBS) curves are then used to fit the noised estimation, resulting in a denoised and refined UPMOP sequence. Finally, the Attention-GRU model is employed to extract features from the denoised UPMOP sequences to identify radar emitters automatically. Results from simulation and measured data experiments show that the overall recognition rate of the algorithm reaches over 93% and the algorithm has excellent performance, with high identification accuracy and relatively low time consumption, even in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions.

An intelligent radar signal classification and deinterleaving method with unified residual recurrent neural network

AbstractThe accuracy of radar emitter signal sorting nowadays deteriorates due to the high flexibility and complexity of modern radar pulse streams and the density of crowded electromagnetic environment. In modern radar signal sorting based on pulse repetition interval, conventional methods usually fail to achieve acceptable accuracy and lack stable performance for two main reasons: (1) Conventional methods require a large number of pulses in the stream, which is not practical in many applications. (2) These methods are sensitive to pulse loss and random noise pulses. These two reasons are the main problem that is addressed in this paper. Our proposed model is a machine learning architecture called Unified Residual Recurrent Neural Network (URRNN). In this architecture, residual neural network and recurrent neural network are combined and modified to alleviate the forementioned shortcomings of traditional approaches and enhance the model performance in both classification and deinterleaving tasks. This aim is achieved due to the fact that URRNN extracts both spatial and temporal features, which means more information about processed stream that is exploited to enhance model performance. Three different architectural combinations of URRNN, which show high accuracy and reasonable processing time, are built and trained. The structural and functional description are provided for each architecture. Simulation demonstrates high accuracy and reliable performance of the proposed methods in different circumstances. The results are compared with the results obtained by other conventional machine learning techniques.

Radar Spectrum Image Classification Based on Deep Learning

With the continuous development and progress of science and technology, the increasingly complex electromagnetic environment and the research and development of new radar systems have led to the emergence of various radar signals. Traditional methods of radar emitter identification cannot meet the needs of current practical applications. For the purpose of classification and recognition of radar emitter signals, this paper proposes an improved EfficientNetv2-s classification method based on deep learning for more precise classification and recognition of radar radiation source signals. Using 16 different types of radar signal parameters from the signal parameter setting table, the proposed method generates random data sets consisting of spectrum images with varying amplitude. The proposed method replaces two-dimensional convolution in EfficientNetV2 with one-dimensional convolution. Additionally, the channel attention mechanism of the EfficientNetv2-s is optimized and modified to obtain attention weights without dimensional reduction, resulting in superior accuracy. Compared with other deep-learning image-classification methods, the test results of this method have better classification accuracy on the test set: the top1 accuracy reaches 98.12%, which is 0.17~3.12% higher than other methods. Furthermore, the proposed method has lower complexity compared to most methods.

A Sorting Method of SAR Emitter Signal Sorting Based on Self-Supervised Clustering

Most existing methods for sorting synthetic aperture radar (SAR) emitter signals rely on either unsupervised clustering or supervised classification methods. However, unsupervised clustering can consume a significant amount of computational and storage space and is sensitive to the setting of hyperparameters, while supervised classification requires a considerable number of labeled samples. To address these limitations, we propose a self-supervised clustering-based method for sorting SAR radiation source signals. The method uses a constructed affinity propagation-convolutional neural network (AP-CNN) to perform self-supervised clustering of a large number of unlabeled signal time-frequency images into multiple clusters in the first stage. Subsequently, it uses a self-organizing map (SOM) network combined with inter-pulse parameters for further sorting in the second stage. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other depth models and conventional methods in the environment where Gaussian white noise affects the signal. The experiments conducted using measured data also show the superiority of the proposed method in this paper.

Radar Communication Jamming Signal Recognition Based on the Attention Mechanism

In modern battlefields, radar radiation sources detect targets by transmitting high-power modulated signals. In order to protect the operational effectiveness of the radar, there is a higher requirement for radar communication anti-jamming signal recognition capability. The accurate and fast identification of radar anti-jamming signals is the prerequisite for taking effective anti-jamming measures, which will directly affect the operational effectiveness of radar. At present, the recognition method based on the neural network can automatically extract signal features and obtain good recognition results. Because radar emitter signals have a strong correlation in time sequence, the LSTM network is used in this paper. For better feature extraction and classification of signals, this paper constructs the LSTM attention network, combines the attention mechanism with the LSTM recognition network, and proves the effectiveness of radar communication jamming signal recognition network based on the attention mechanism through experiments.

A Time-Frequency Image Denoising Method via Neural Networks for Radar Waveform Recognition

Time-frequency images (TFIs) of radar emitter signals can reflect intra-pulse modulation information and be utilized to recognize waveforms, which is helpful for radar emitter identification. However, radar signals are usually interfered with by noise, therefore the robustness of TFIs needs to be improved. This letter proposes a TFI denoising method based on neural networks which can contribute to identifying radar waveforms at the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Firstly, a neural network is trained to generate denoised spectrums from time-domain signals directly. Then the discrete Fourier transform operation in the short-time Fourier transform is replaced by the trained neural network to obtain denoised TFIs. Finally, several advanced convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are employed to classify these TFIs to realize waveform recognition and verify the effect of the proposed denoising method. In the experiment, 16 types of waveforms are simulated for recognition through several methods. The results show that the proposed method reduces the noise in the TFIs significantly, leading to the recognition accuracy being improved under different CNN structures.

Few-Shot Radar Emitter Signal Recognition Based on Attention-Balanced Prototypical Network

In recent years, radar emitter signal identification has been greatly developed via the utilization of deep learning and has achieved significant improvements in identification accuracy. However, with the continuous emergence of complex regime radars and the increasing complexity of the electromagnetic environment, some new kinds of radar emitter signals collected are not in sufficient quantities to satisfy the demand of deep learning. As a result, in this paper, we adopted the prototypical network (PN) belonging to metric-based meta-learning to realize few-shot radar emitter signal recognition with the aim of meeting the needs of modern electronic warfare. Additionally, considering the problems that may arise in the field of few-shot radar emitter signal recognition, such as discriminative location bias caused by a small number of base classes or the large difference between base classes and novel classes, we proposed an attention-balanced strategy to improve meta-learning. Specifically, each channel in the feature map is forced to make the same contribution in the distinguishment of different classes. In addition, for PN, taking into account that the feature vectors of each support sample in the class are different, we set a network to exploit the relation between each support sample in the same classes, and weighted each feature vector of the support samples according to the relation. Large quantities of experiments indicate that our algorithm possesses more advantages than other algorithms.

Towards Single-Component and Dual-Component Radar Emitter Signal Intra-Pulse Modulation Classification Based on Convolutional Neural Network and Transformer

In the modern electromagnetic environment, the intra-pulse modulations of radar emitter signals have become more complex. Except for the single-component radar signals, dual-component radar signals have been widely used in the current radar systems. In order to make the radar system have the ability to classify single-component and dual-component intra-pulse modulation at the same period of time accurately, in this paper, we propose a multi-label learning method based on a convolutional neural network and transformer. Firstly, the original single channel sampled sequences are padded with zeros to the same length. Then the padded sequences are converted to frequency-domain sequences that only contain the amplitude information. After that, data normalization is employed to decrease the influence of amplitude. After radar signals preprocessing, a designed model which combines a convolutional neural network and transformer is used to accomplish multi-label classification. The extensive experiments indicate that the proposed method consumes lower computation resources and has higher accuracy than other baseline methods in classifying eight types of single and thirty-six types of dual-component intra-pulse modulation, where the overall accuracy and weighted accuracy are beyond 90%.

Embedding Soft Thresholding Function into Deep Learning Models for Noisy Radar Emitter Signal Recognition

Radar emitter signal recognition under noisy background is one of the focus areas in research on radar signal processing. In this study, the soft thresholding function is embedded into deep learning network models as a novel nonlinear activation function, achieving advanced radar emitter signal recognition results. Specifically, an embedded sub-network is used to learn the threshold of soft thresholding function according to the input feature, which results in each input feature having its own independent nonlinear activation function. Compared with conventional activation functions, the soft thresholding function is characterized by flexible nonlinear conversion and the ability to obtain more discriminative features. By this way, the noise features can be flexibly filtered while retaining signal features, thus improving recognition accuracy. Under the condition of Gaussian and Laplacian noise with signal-to-noise ratio of −8 dB to −2 dB, experimental results show that the overall average accuracy of soft thresholding function reached 88.55%, which was 11.82%, 8.12%, 2.16%, and 1.46% higher than those of Sigmoid, PReLU, ReLU, ELU, and SELU, respectively.

Semi-Supervised Classification for Intra-Pulse Modulation of Radar Emitter Signals Using Convolutional Neural Network

Intra-pulse modulation classification of radar emitter signals is beneficial in analyzing radar systems. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been used in classification of intra-pulse modulation of radar emitter signals, and the results proved better than the traditional methods. However, there is a key disadvantage in these CNN-based methods: the CNN requires enough labeled samples. Labeling the modulations of radar emitter signal samples requires a tremendous amount of prior knowledge and human resources. In many circumstances, the labeled samples are quite limited compared with the unlabeled samples, which means that the classification will be semi-supervised. In this paper, we propose a method which could adapt the CNN-based intra-pulse classification approach to the case where a very limited number of labeled samples and a large number of unlabeled samples are provided, to classify the intra-pulse modulations of radar emitter signals. The method is based on a one-dimensional CNN and uses pseudo labels and self-paced data augmentation, which could improve the accuracy of intra-pulse classification. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method can improve the intra-pulse modulation classification performance in the semi-supervised situations.

Few-Shot Learning for Radar Emitter Signal Recognition Based on Improved Prototypical Network

In recent years, deep learning has been widely used in radar emitter signal identification and has significantly increased recognition rates. However, with the emergence of new institutional radars and an increasingly complex electromagnetic environment, the collection of high-quality signals becomes difficult, leading to a result that the amount of some signal types we own are too few to converge a deep neural network. Moreover, in radar emitter signal identification, most existing networks ignore the signal recognition of unknown classes, which is of vital importance for radar emitter signal identification. To solve these two problems, an improved prototypical network (IPN) belonging to metric-based meta-learning is proposed. Firstly, a reparameterization VGG (RepVGG) net is used to replace the original structure that severely limits the model performance. Secondly, we added a feature adjustment operation to prevent some extreme or unimportant samples from affecting the prototypes. Thirdly, open-set recognition is realized by setting a threshold in the metric module.