A Novel Method of Radar Emitter Identification Based on the Coherent Feature

Abstract

To deal with the problem of reliability degradation of radar emitter identification (REID) based on the traditional five parameters in a complex electromagnetic environment, a new feature extraction method based on the autocorrelation function of coherent signals, which makes full use of the coherent characteristic of modern radar emitters, is proposed in this paper. The main idea of this paper is utilizing the instantaneous autocorrelation function to obtain the correlation results of coherent and noncoherent signals. To this end, a new feature parameter, named the ratio of the secondary peak value to the main peak value (SMR), is defined to describe the difference of correlation results between coherent and noncoherent signals. Through simulation analysis, the feasibility of using SMR as the coherent feature for REID is verified. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the coherent feature, an analytical hierarchy process (AHP) was introduced to compare the comprehensive performance of the coherent feature and the existing parameters, and then convolution neural network (CNN) and support vector machine (SVM) were selected as the classifier to check the recognition capability of the proposed feature. Simulation results show that the proposed feature can not only be used as a new feature for REID but can also be used as a supplement to existing feature parameters to improve the accuracy of REID as it is more insensitive to the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and signal modulation type changes.