Recognition of Unknown Radar Emitters with Machine Learning

Abstract

Classifiers based on machine learning are usually trained to distinguish between several known classes. For an electronic intelligence application, however, it is of great importance to recognize if an intercepted signal belongs to an unknown radar emitter. In the machine learning literature, this task is called open-set recognition. This article investigates six approaches in several configurations to recognize unknown emitters. It is based on a hierarchical emission model that understands emissions as a language with an inherent hierarchical structure. We consider two general approaches, which are the 'memoryless' Markov chain and the Long Short-Term Memory recurrent neural network, which is especially designed to 'remember' the past. The performance is demonstrated with two evaluation metrics in ten scenarios that contain different combinations of known and unknown emitters. An evaluation with corrupted data provides an estimate on the methods' accuracies under challenging conditions. The results show that unknown emitters that do not use known waveforms are reliably recognized even with corrupted data, while unknown emitters that are more similar to known ones are harder to detect.