Accurate LPI Radar Waveform Recognition With CWD-TFA for Deep Convolutional Network

Automotive radars, with a widespread emergence in the last decade, have faced various jamming attacks. Utilizing low probability of intercept (LPI) radar waveforms, as one of the essential solutions, demands an accurate waveform recognizer at the intercept receiver. Numerous conventional approaches have been studied for LPI radar waveform recognition, but their performance is inadequate under channel condition deterioration. In this paper, by exploiting deep learning (DL) to capture intrinsic radio characteristics, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN), namely LPI-Net, for automatic radar waveform recognition. In particular, radar signals are first analyzed by a time-frequency analysis using the Choi-Williams distribution. Subsequently, LPI-Net, primarily consisting of three sophisticated modules, is built to learn the representational features of time-frequency images, in which each module is constructed with a preceding maps collection to gain feature diversity and a skip-connection to maintain informative identity. Simulation results show that LPI-Net achieves the 13-waveform recognition accuracy of over 98% at 0 dB SNR and further performs better than other deep models.