Towards Self-supervised Learning for Multi-function Radar Behavior State Detection and Recognition

Abstract

<div>The analysis of intercepted multi-function radar (MFR) signals has gained considerable attention in the field of cognitive electronic reconnaissance. With the rapid development of MFR, the switch between different work modes is becoming more flexible, increasing the agility of pulse parameters. Most of the existing approaches for recognizing MFR behaviors heavily depend on prior information, which can hardly be obtained in a non-cooperative way. This study develops a novel hierarchical contrastive self-supervise-based method for segmenting and clustering MFR pulse sequences. First, a convolutional neural network (CNN) with a limited receptive field is trained in a contrastive way to distinguish between pulse descriptor words (PDW) in the original order and the samples created by random permutations to detect the boundary between each radar word and perform segmentation. Afterward, the K-means++ algorithm with cosine distances is established to cluster the segmented PDWs according to the output vectors of the CNN’s last layer for radar words extraction. This segmenting and clustering process continues to go in the extracted radar word sequence, radar phase sequence, and so on, finishing the automatic extraction of MFR behavior states in the MFR hierarchical model. Simulation results show that without using any labeled data, the proposed method can effectively mine distinguishable patterns in the sequentially arriving PDWs and recognize the MFR behavior states under corrupted, overlapped pulse parameters.</div>