Radio–image transformer: Bridging radio modulation classification and imagenet classification

Abstract

Radio modulation classification is widely used in the field of wireless communication. In this paper, in order to realize radio modulation classification with the help of the existing ImageNet classification models, we propose a radio–image transformer which extracts the instantaneous amplitude, instantaneous phase and instantaneous frequency from the received radio complex baseband signals, then converts the signals into images by the proposed signal rearrangement method or convolution mapping method. We finally use the existing ImageNet classification network models to classify the modulation type of the signal. The experimental results show that the proposed signal rearrangement method and convolution mapping method are superior to the methods using constellation diagrams and time–frequency images, which shows their performance advantages. In addition, by comparing the results of the seven ImageNet classification network models, it can be seen that, except for the relatively poor performance of the architecture MNASNet1_0, the modulation classification performance obtained by the other six network architectures is similar, indicating that the proposed methods do not have high requirements for the architecture of the selected ImageNet classification network models. Moreover, the experimental results show that our method has good classification performance for signal datasets with different sampling rates, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) signals and real measured signals.