Model-Based Representation and Deinterleaving of Mixed Radar Pulse Sequences With Neural Machine Translation Network

• Published in: IEEE transactions on aerospace and electronic systems Vol. 58; no. 3; pp. 1733 - 1752
• Main Authors: Zhu, Mengtao, Wang, Shafei, Li, Yunjie
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.06.2022; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Cost function; Deinterleaving; Hidden Markov models; interpulse modulation; Machine translation; Mathematical models; maximum-likelihood (ML); Mixtures; model-based representation; Modulation; neural machine translation (NMT); Noise measurement; Probabilistic logic; Radar; Representations; Sequences; Task analysis; Time series analysis; time series characteristics
• ISSN: 0018-9251; 1557-9603
• DOI: 10.1109/TAES.2021.3122411

Deinterleaving mixtures of radar pulse sequences is the first and the most vital step for modern electronic reconnaissance systems to intercept and analyze the intentions of noncooperative radars. Currently, these systems are facing great challenges due to the emerging complexity of radar modulations. This article proposes a novel method for deinterleaving mixtures of radar pulse sequences based on the time series characteristics of each source (component pulse sequences). First, the mathematical representations are established to describe the structural characteristics of each source. Then, the deinterleaving problem is formulated as a minimization of a maximum-likelihood cost function that can be solved efficiently through a supervised neural machine translation (NMT) network, i.e., to translate each received pulse in the interleaved pulse sequence to the corresponding source label. A sequence-to-sequence NMT model is proposed to capture the structural relationships among the nonadjacent pulses originated from the same source in the mixtures and assign the corresponding label to each pulse. The proposed method does not require the exact knowledge of each component pulse sequence. The experimental results based on the time of arrival sequence of mixed pulse sequences show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art deinterleaving methods and achieves satisfactory performance under highly nonideal situations with measuring noise and lost pulse conditions. The proposed method can be directly applied to other fields involving deinterleaving problems and multivariate input conditions.