Interpolative Metric Learning for Few-Shot Specific Emitter Identification

Specific emitter identification (SEI) is a potential physical layer authentication technology, which is one of the most critical complements of upper layer authentication. Radio frequency fingerprint (RFF)-based SEI is to distinguish one emitter from each other by immutable RF characteristics from electronic components. Due to the powerful ability of deep learning (DL) to extract hidden features and perform classification, it can extract highly separative features from massive signal samples, thus enabling SEI. Considering the condition of limited training samples, we propose a novel few-shot SEI (FS-SEI) method based on interpolative metric learning (InterML) which gets rid of the dependence on auxiliary dataset. Specifically, InterML is designed to mine more implicit samples in the sample space to improve generalization, and constrain the feature distance in the feature space to improve discriminability. The proposed InterML-based FS-SEI method is evaluated on a real-world Wi-Fi dataset. The simulation results show that the proposed method achieves better identification performance, higher feature discriminability and more stable performance than five latest FS-SEI methods. In the 10 shot scenario, the identification accuracy of InterML is 91.48%, compared to the comparison methods, the accuracy is improved by 0.62%–31.29%.