Large-Scale Classification of Shortwave Communication Signals with Machine Learning

Abstract

This paper presents a deep learning approach to the classification of 160 shortwave radio signals. It addresses the typical challenges of the shortwave spectrum, which are the large number of different signal types, the presence of various analog modulations and ionospheric propagation. As a classifier a deep convolutional neural network is used, that is trained to recognize 160 typical shortwave signal classes. The approach is blind and therefore does not require preknowledge or special preprocessing of the signal and no manual design of discriminative features for each signal class. The network is trained on a large number of synthetically generated signals and high quality recordings. Finally, the network is evaluated on real-world radio signals obtained from globally deployed receiver hardware and achieves up to 90% accuracy for an observation time of only 1 second.