Analysis and Classification of Airborne Radar Signal Types Using Time-Frequency Analysis

An electronic support (ES) system is used by the military for intelligence gathering, threat detection, and as a support to the electronic attack system. Its main feature is to determine the frequency parameters and pulse characteristics of the received radar signal. The estimated signal parameters are then used as input to a classifier network to determine the identity of the received signal. This paper describes airborne radar signal type analysis and classification (ARTAC) system that uses the spectrogram to obtain the time-frequency representation (TFR) and apply analysis tools such as the instantaneous energy, instantaneous frequency and other related tools to estimate various signal parameters. The estimated parameters are used as input to the rule-based classifier which classifies the signal appropriately. Monte-Carlo simulation is then carried out to determine the accuracy of signal classification at various signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). The method used achieves 90 percent classification accuracy at SNR of 6.2dB.