Virtual electromagnetic environment modeling based data augmentation for drone signal identification

Abstract

Radio frequency (RF)-based drone identification technologies have the advantages of long effective distances and low environmental dependence, which has become indispensable for drone surveillance systems. However, since drones operate in unlicensed frequency bands, a large number of co-frequency devices exist in these bands, which brings a great challenge to traditional signal identification methods. Deep learning techniques provide a new approach to complete end-to-end signal identification by directly learning the distribution of RF data. In such scenarios, due to the complexity and high dynamics of the electromagnetic environments, a massive amount of data that can reflect the various propagation conditions of drone signals is necessary for a robust neural network (NN) for identifying drones. In reality, signal acquisition and labeling that meet the above requirements are too costly to implement. Therefore, we propose a virtual electromagnetic environment modeling based data augmentation (DA) method to improve the diversity of drone signal data. The DA method focuses on simulating the spectrograms of drone signals transmitted in real-world environments and randomly generates extra training data in each training epoch. Furthermore, considering the limited processing capability of RF receivers, we modify the original YOLOv5s model to a more lightweight version. Without losing the identification performance, more hardware-friendly designs are applied and the number of parameters decreases about 10-fold. For performance evaluation, we utilized a universal software radio peripheral (USRP) X310 platform to collect RF signals of four drones in an anechoic chamber and a practical wireless scenario. Experiment results reveal that the NN trained with augmented data performs as well as that trained with practical data in the complex electromagnetic environment.