LPI radar waveform recognition based on features from multiple images

Abstract

Detecting and classifying the modulation type of the intercepted noisy LPI (low probability of intercept) radar signals in real-time is a necessary survival technique in the electronic intelligence systems. Most radar signals have been designed to have LPI properties; therefore, the LPI radar waveform recognition technique (LWRT) has recently gained increasing attention. In this paper, we propose a multiple feature images joint decision (MFIJD) model with two different feature extraction structures that fully extract the pixel feature to obtain the pre-classification results of each feature image for the non-stationary characteristics of most LPI radar signals. The core technology of this model is combining the short-time autocorrelation feature image, double short-time autocorrelation feature image and the original signal time-frequency image (TFI) simultaneously input into the hybrid model classifier, which is suitable for non-stationary signals, and it has higher universality. We demonstrate the performance of MFIJD by simulating 11 types of the signals defined in this paper and generating training sets and test sets. The comparison with the literature shows that the proposed methods not only has a high universality for LPI radar signals, but also better adapts to LPI radar waveform recognition at low SNR (signal to noise ratio) environment. The overall recognition rate of the method reaches 87.7% when the SNR is −6 dB.