Phase-Modulated Radar Waveform Classification Using Deep Networks

We consider the problem of classifying noisy, phase-modulated radar waveforms. While traditionally this has been accomplished by applying classical machine-learning algorithms on hand-crafted features, it has recently been shown that better performance can be attained by training deep neural networks (DNNs) to classify raw I/Q waveforms. However, existing DNNs assume time-synchronized waveforms and do not exploit complex-valued signal structure, and many aspects of the their DNN design and training are suboptimal. We demonstrate that, with an improved DNN architecture and training procedure, it is possible to reduce classification error from 18% to 0.14% on asynchronous waveforms from the SIDLE dataset. Unlike past work, we furthermore demonstrate that accurate classification of multiple overlapping waveforms is also possible, by achieving 4.0% error with 4 asynchronous SIDLE waveforms.