Automatic recognition of pulse repetition interval modulation using temporal convolutional network

Abstract

Pulse Repetition Interval (PRI) modulation recognition is a key issue in radar identification process in modern electronic intelligent (ELINT) and electronic support measure (ESM) systems. In this study, a novel approach based on the intrinsic property of the temporal convolutional network (TCN) is presented for PRI modulation type recognition. Since a causal TCN is used for this purpose, the method is suitable for online ESM and ELINT analysis. The simulation results show that the method accurately classifies seven types of PRI modulation including simple, dwell and switch, stagger, jitter, agile, sliding and periodic modulations in realistic scenarios. In order to investigate the performance of the method when the problem of missing or spurious pulses occurs, the impacts of these problems are examined, separately and together, on the recognition process. It is shown that the method works effectively even with a relatively high percentage of missing and/or spurious pulses (up to 30%). The method also works effectively in the presence of unintentional jitter and large outliers, which can be due to radar antenna scan. The experimental results on real data confirm that the proposed method performs accurately and effectively in real world scenarios.