Semantic Learning for Analysis of Overlapping LPI Radar Signals

The increasingly complex radio environment may cause the received low probability of intercept (LPI) radar signals to overlap in time-frequency domains. Analyzing overlapping LPI radar signals requires identifying the modulation type and estimating the parameters of each component. Prior research performs overlapping signal analysis as a multistage task, where each stage is designed to perform a part of the task. The multistage system will increase the calculation burden and cannot be optimized as a whole. Instead, this article proposes a novel framework for analyzing overlapping signals in a single stage. Specifically, we develop a joint semantic learning deep convolutional neural network (JSLCNN) that jointly learns three tasks, i.e., feature restoration, modulation classification, and parameter regression. Since the whole cognitive pipeline is a single network, it can be optimized end-to-end directly on cognitive performance. To verify the validity of the proposed JSLCNN, numerous comparative experiments are carried out in terms of modulation recognition and parameter estimation of overlapping signals. Experimental results demonstrate that the JSLCNN has desirable extensibility for identifying unseen signal combinations and robustness against unknown jamming. Furthermore, we show that the JSLCNN outperforms other existing approaches in generic real-time parameter estimation for LPI radar signals.