Modulation recognition of signals with low SNR based on time-frequency
reassignment and deep learning
Abstract
The recognition of modulation type is of great significance in
non-cooperative communication systems. With the increasingly complex
electromagnetic environment, automatic modulation recognition at low
signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) has received more attention. Due to the
time/frequency uncertainty principle, it is difficult to capture
time-domain and frequency-domain features precisely at the same time. To
alleviate this difficulty and improve the modulation recognition
accuracy for low SNR signals, we present a new modulation recognition
method in this letter. We firstly propose the time-frequency
reassignment (TFR) technique to convert one-dimensional signals into a
time-frequency images (TFIs), and then we modify and adopt the
high-accuracy VGG800 deep network to classify TFIs. Under low SNR this
method can effectively distinguish seven major modulation types of
signals: binary amplitude shift keying (2ASK), quadrate amplitude shift
keying (4ASK), binary frequency shift keying (2FSK), quadrate frequency
shift keying (4FSK), binary phase-shift keying (2PSK), quadrate
phase-shift keying (4PSK) and 16 quadrature amplitude modulation
(16QAM). Experimental results quantitatively demonstrate that the
classification accuracy of TFR is higher than short-time Fourier
transform (STFT) in cases where SNR ≦ -6 dB.