OAE-EEKNN: An Accurate and Efficient Automatic Modulation Recognition Method for Underwater Acoustic Signals

The automatic modulation recognition (AMR) enables the receiver to automatically recognize the modulation type of the received signal for achieving correct demodulation. However, the noise and interference in the underwater acoustic channel greatly influence the features extracted from the signals. In this letter, we proposed the optimizing autoencoder (OAE) and the evaluation enhanced K-nearest neighbors (EEKNN) algorithms. The combination of OAE and EEKNN not only improves the feature discrimination but also avoids the misjudgment caused by abnormal samples and realizes accurate and efficient AMR. The experimental results of the data measured in the South China sea show that the proposed method successfully recognizes eight modulation types. The recognition accuracy is up to 99.25%, and the recognition time is only 3.48 ms.