Blind Detection of Broadband Signal Based on Weighted Bi-Directional Feature Pyramid Network

Sensors (Basel). 2023 Jan 30;23(3):1525. doi: 10.3390/s23031525.

Abstract

With the development of wireless technology, signals propagating in space are easy to mix, so blind detection of communication signals has become a very practical and challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a blind detection method for broadband signals based on a weighted bi-directional feature pyramid network (BiFPN). The method can quickly perform detection and automatic modulation identification (AMC) on time-domain aliased signals in broadband data. Firstly, the method performs a time-frequency analysis on the received signals and extracts the normalized time-frequency images and the corresponding labels by short-time Fourier transform (STFT). Secondly, we build a target detection model based on YOLOv5 for time-domain mixed signals in broadband data and learn the features of the time-frequency distribution image dataset of broadband signals, which achieves the purpose of training the model. The main improvements of the algorithm are as follows: (1) a weighted bi-directional feature pyramid network is used to achieve a simple and fast multi-scale feature fusion approach to improve the detection probability; (2) the Efficient-Intersection over Union (EIOU) loss function is introduced to achieve high accuracy signal detection in a low Signal-Noise Ratio (SNR) environment. Finally, the time-frequency images are detected by an improved deep network model to complete the blind detection of time-domain mixed signals. The simulation results show that the method can effectively detect the continuous and burst signals in the broadband communication signal data and identify their modulation types.

Keywords: BiFPN; EIOU; automatic modulation identification; short-time Fourier transform; signal blind detection.