Ensemble convolutional neural networks for automatic fusion recognition of multi-platform radar emitters

Presently, the extraction of hand-crafted features is still the dominant method in radar emitter recognition. To solve the complicated problems of selection and updation of empirical features, we present a novel automatic feature extraction structure based on deep learning. In particular, a convolutional neural network (CNN) is adopted to extract high-level abstract representations from the time-frequency images of emitter signals. Thus, the redundant process of designing discriminative features can be avoided. Furthermore, to address the performance degradation of a single platform, we propose the construction of an ensemble learning-based architecture for multi-platform fusion recognition. Experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithms are feasible and effective, and they outperform other typical feature extraction and fusion recognition methods in terms of accuracy. Moreover, the proposed structure could be extended to other prevalent ensemble learning alternatives.