Specific Emitter Identification Based on Deep Residual Networks

Specific emitter identification (SEI) enables the discrimination of individual radio emitters with the external features carried by the received waveforms. This identification technique has been widely adopted in military and civil applications. However, many previous methods based on hand-crafted features are subject to the present expertise. To remedy these shortcomings, this paper presents a novel SEI algorithm using deep learning architecture. First, we perform Hilbert-Huang transform on the received signal and convert the resulting Hilbert spectrum into a grayscale image. As a signal representation, the Hilbert spectrum image has high information integrity and can provide abundant information about the nonlinear and non-stationary characteristics of signals for identifying emitters. Thereafter, we construct a deep residual network for learning the visual differences reflected in the Hilbert spectrum images. By using the residual architectures, we effectively address the degradation problem, which improves efficiency and generalization. From our analysis, the proposed approach combines high information integrity with low complexity, which outperforms previous studies in the literature. The simulation results validate that the Hilbert spectrum image is a successful signal representation, and also demonstrate that the fingerprints extracted from raw images using deep learning are more effective and robust than the expert ones. Furthermore, our method has the capability of adapting to signals collected under various conditions.