RF signal-based UAV detection and mode classification: a joint feature engineering generator and multi-channel deep neural network approach

Yang, S., Luo, Y., Miao, W., Ge, C., Sun, W. and Luo, C. (2021) RF signal-based UAV detection and mode classification: a joint feature engineering generator and multi-channel deep neural network approach. Entropy, 23(12), 1678. (doi: 10.3390/e23121678)

Abstract

With the proliferation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to provide diverse critical services, such as surveillance, disaster management, and medicine delivery, the accurate detection of these small devices and the efficient classification of their flight modes are of paramount importance to guarantee their safe operation in our sky. Among the existing approaches, Radio Frequency (RF) based methods are less affected by complex environmental factors. The similarities between UAV RF signals and the diversity of frequency components make accurate detection and classification a particularly difficult task. To bridge this gap, we propose a joint Feature Engineering Generator (FEG) and Multi-Channel Deep Neural Network (MC-DNN) approach. Specifically, in FEG, data truncation and normalization separate different frequency components, the moving average filter reduces the outliers in the RF signal, and the concatenation fully exploits the details of the dataset. In addition, the multi-channel input in MC-DNN separates multiple frequency components and reduces the interference between them. A novel dataset that contains ten categories of RF signals from three types of UAVs is used to verify the effectiveness. Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art UAV detection and classification approaches in terms of 98.4% and F1 score of 98.3%.

• Item Type: Articles
• Additional Information: This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China grant number 61871096, and National Key R&D Program of China grant number 2018YFB2101300.
• Keywords: Unmanned aerial vehicles, UAV detection, UAV mode classification, Feature Engineering Generator, multi-channel deep neural network.
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Ge, Changhao

Creator Roles

Ge, C.: Investigation

• Authors: Yang, S., Luo, Y., Miao, W., Ge, C., Sun, W., and Luo, C.
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Engineering
• Journal Name: Entropy
• Publisher: MDPI
• ISSN: 1099-4300
• ISSN (Online): 1099-4300
• Published Online: 14 December 2021
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2021 The Authors
• First Published: First published in Entropy 23(12): 1678
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons License

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