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Signal classification based on multi-Scale time-Frequency transformer

delete2026-02-01
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PRE
AI
J
Jiahuang Yang
Y
Y. Wang
M
M. Yang *
H
Hua Meng
DOI:10.1016/j.phycom.2026.103022delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Recognizing communication signals under non-cooperative remains challenging due to long waveform durations, noise corruption, and complex time-frequency structures. Existing convolutional neural network-, recurrent neural network-, and Transformer-based methods often rely on a single modeling paradigm and struggle to jointly capture local waveform patterns, long-range temporal dependencies, and complementary spectral information. To address these limitations, we propose MTF-Former, a Multi-scale time-frequency Transformer tailored for one-dimensional radio-frequency (RF) signals. MTF-Former combines signal-oriented data augmentation, a lightweight Time-Frequency Enhancement (TFE) block that injects frequency-aware modulation, and a hierarchical windowed Transformer encoder for efficient multi-scale temporal modeling. This unified design effectively integrates temporal and spectral cues while reducing computational cost compared with standard global self-attention Transformers for long sequences. Experiments on specific emitter identification (SEI) and automatic modulation recognition (AMR) benchmarks demonstrate that MTF-Former consistently outperforms many methods, achieving more notable performance gains at lower signal to noise ratio, with accuracy improvements of 1.30% on SEI (5 dB) and 2.42% on AMR (0 dB), and ablation studies further validate the contribution of each component.
Keywords:
Communication signal recognition
Time-frequency analysis
Transformer networks

Journal

Physical Communication cover
Physical Communication
IF:
2.2
Papers:
360
Citations:
2.6K

Organization

S
southwest jiaotong university
Scholars:
9.2K
Papers: 3.2K
Citations: 0