Mitigating Receiver Impact on Radio Frequency Fingerprint Identification via Domain Adaptation

Radio Frequency Fingerprint Identification (RFFI), which exploits non-ideal hardware-induced unique distortion resident in the transmit signals to identify an emitter, is emerging as a means to enhance the security of communication systems. Recently, machine learning has achieved great success in developing state-of-the-art RFFI models. However, few works consider cross-receiver RFFI problems, where the RFFI model is trained and deployed on different receivers. Due to altered receiver characteristics, direct deployment of RFFI model on a new receiver leads to significant performance degradation. To address this issue, we formulate the cross-receiver RFFI as a model adaptation problem, which adapts the trained model to unlabeled signals from a new receiver. We first develop a theoretical generalization error bound for the adaptation model. Motivated by the bound, we propose a novel method to solve the cross-receiver RFFI problem, which includes domain alignment and adaptive pseudo-labeling. The former aims at finding a feature space where both domains exhibit similar distributions, effectively reducing the domain discrepancy. Meanwhile, the latter employs a dynamic pseudo-labeling scheme to implicitly transfer the label information from the labeled receiver to the new receiver. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method can effectively mitigate the receiver impact and improve the cross-receiver RFFI performance.

Class Information Guided Reconstruction for Automatic Modulation Open-Set Recognition

Automatic Modulation Recognition (AMR) is a crucial technology in the domains of radar and communications. Traditional AMR approaches assume a closed-set scenario, where unknown samples are forcibly misclassified into known classes, leading to serious consequences for situation awareness and threat assessment. To address this issue, Automatic Modulation Open-set Recognition (AMOSR) defines two tasks as Known Class Classification (KCC) and Unknown Class Identification (UCI). However, AMOSR faces core challenges in terms of inappropriate decision boundaries and sparse feature distributions. To overcome the aforementioned challenges, we propose a Class Information guided Reconstruction (CIR) framework, which leverages reconstruction losses to distinguish known and unknown classes. To enhance distinguishability, we design Class Conditional Vectors (CCVs) to match the latent representations extracted from input samples, achieving perfect reconstruction for known samples while yielding poor results for unknown ones. We also propose a Mutual Information (MI) loss function to ensure reliable matching, with upper and lower bounds of MI derived for tractable optimization and mathematical proofs provided. The mutually beneficial CCVs and MI facilitate the CIR attaining optimal UCI performance without compromising KCC accuracy, especially in scenarios with a higher proportion of unknown classes. Additionally, a denoising module is introduced before reconstruction, enabling the CIR to achieve a significant performance improvement at low SNRs. Experimental results on simulated and measured signals validate the effectiveness and the robustness of the proposed method.

Online Parameter Estimation and Change Point Detection for Multi-function Radar Pulse Sequence Based on the Bayesian Non-parametric HMM

Multi-function radars (MFRs) are sophisticated types of sensors with the capabilities of complex agile inter-pulse modulation implementation and dynamic work mode scheduling. The developments in MFRs pose great challenges to modern electronic reconnaissance systems or radar warning receivers for recognition and inference of MFR work modes. To address this issue, this paper proposes an online processing framework for parameter estimation and change point detection of MFR work modes. At first this paper designed a fully-conjugate Bayesian non-parametric hidden Markov model with a designed prior (agile BNP-HMM) to represent the MFR pulse agility characteristics. The proposed model allows fully-variational Bayesian inference. Then, the proposed framework is constructed by two main parts. The first part is the agile BNP-HMM model for automatically inferring data on pulse parameter clusters and corresponding number of clusters from input pulse sequence. The second part utilizes the streaming Bayesian updating to facilitate computation, and designed a online work mode change detection framework based upon a family of one-ended sequential probability ratio test. We demonstrate that the proposed framework is consistently highly effective and robust to baseline methods on diverse simulated data-sets.