Classification of Radio Signals Using Truncated Gaussian Discriminant Analysis of Convolutional Neural Network-Derived Features

Abstract: To improve the utility and scalability of distributed radio frequency (RF) sensor and communication networks, reduce the need for convolutional neural network (CNN) retraining, and efficiently share learned information about signals, we examined a supervised bootstrapping approach for RF modulation classification. We show that CNN-bootstrapped features of new and existing modulation classes can be considered as mixtures of truncated Gaussian distributions, allowing for maximumlikelihood-based classification of new classes without retraining the network. In this work, the authors observed classification performance using maximum likelihood estimation of CNNbootstrapped features to be comparable to that of a CNN trained on all classes, even for those classes on which the bootstrapping CNN was not trained. This performance was achieved while reducing the number of parameters needed for new class definition from over 8 million to only 200. Furthermore, some physical features of interest, not directly labeled during training, e.g. signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), can be learned or estimated from these same CNN-derived features. Finally, we show that SNR estimation accuracy is highest when classification accuracy is lowest and therefore can be used to calibrate a confidence in the classification.