Recognition of Electromagnetic Signals Based on the Spiking Convolutional Neural Network

Feature extraction and recognition of signals are the bases of a cognitive radio. Traditional manual extraction for signals' features becomes difficult in the complex electromagnetic environment. Although convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can extract signal features automatically, they have low accuracy in recognizing electromagnetic signals at low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) due to the agility of signals. Considering the great potential of spiking neural networks (SNNs) in classification, a spiking convolution neural network (SCNN) for the recognition of electromagnetic signals is proposed in this paper. The SCNN effectively integrates the extraction ability of spatial features in CNNs and temporal features in SNNs. Since the SCNN is difficult to train, the strategy of surrogate gradient is proposed to train it. By taking the 2-dimensional time-frequency distribution of 6 signals as input, the SCNN can effectively identify different signals at low SNRs. The method proposed in this paper contributes to promote the research and application of SNNs in the recognition of electromagnetic signals. © 2022 Shifei Tao et al.