TASE-Net: A Novel Robust Deep-Learning Network for Open-Set Few-Shot UAV Recognition

Xiao Yan, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
Bo Wang, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
Hsiao Chun Wu, Yuan Ze University
Guannan Liu, San Jose State University
Qian Wang, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
Xinyue Qiao, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Abstract

As uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) are employed for many applications, UAV identification becomes critical to air traffic control nowadays. Conventional radio-frequency (RF) based UAV identification schemes can correctly recognize a UAV according to the acquired sufficient training RF signal data from a prespecified training candidate set. However, they may often fail when the model of a test UAV is not included in such a training candidate set and/or the training data are quite limited. To address the aforementioned practical challenges, a novel RF-based open-set few-shot UAV recognition technique is introduced in this work. In our proposed new approach, an RF signal of interest, such as a UAV control signal and a digital data-transmission (DDT) signal, is first sensed and segmented in the UAV frequency band using the corresponding short-time energy-to-spectral entropy ratio (ST-ESER). Then, the cyclic spectrum analysis is applied to the selected RF signal segments to construct the corresponding polyspectra, which are further utilized to establish the cyclic-paw-print (CPP) tensors. Moreover, we design a novel deep-learning (DL) network, namely, transformer-attention squeeze-excitation network (TASE-Net), by fusing the transformer-enhanced squeeze-and-excitation (SE) model and the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) into the residual network. The TASE-Net can excel in global feature modeling and unknown class detection simultaneously especially for the open-set and few-shot scenarios. Finally, the constructed CPPs are adopted as the input features of our proposed new TASE-Net to recognize the RF signals (the UAV models). Monte Carlo simulation results demonstrate that our proposed new UAV recognition approach using the TASE-Net can greatly outperform other existing DL methods for open-set few-shot UAV identification.