Waveform Recognition in Multipath Fading using Autoencoder and CNN with Fourier Synchrosqueezing Transform

In this paper the problem of recognizing radar waveforms is addressed for multipath fading channels. Waveform classification is needed in spectrum sharing, radar-communications coexistence, cognitive radars, spectrum monitoring and signal intelligence. Different radar waveforms exhibit different properties in time-frequency domain. We propose a deep learning method for waveform classification. The received signal is first equalized to mitigate the effect of multipath fading channels by using a denoising auto-encoder (DAE). Then, the equalized signal is processed with Fourier synchrosqueezing transform that has excellent properties in revealing time-varying behavior, rate of, strength and number of oscillatory components in signals. The resulting time-frequency description is represented as a bivariate image that is fed into a convolutional neural network. The proposed method has superior performance over the widely used the Choi-Williams distribution (CWD) method in distinguishing among different radar waveforms even at low signal-to-noise ratio regime.