An Efficient Data Augmentation Method for Automatic Modulation Recognition from Low-Data Imbalanced-Class Regime

• Published in: Applied sciences Vol. 13; no. 5; p. 3177
• Main Authors: Wei, Shengyun, Sun, Zhaolong, Wang, Zhenyi, Liao, Feifan, Li, Zhen, Mi, Haibo
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.03.2023
• Subjects: Accuracy; Automatic modulation recognition; automatic modulation recognition (AMR); Automation; Classification; Data augmentation; Datasets; Deep learning; imbalanced-class; low-data regime; Methods; Neural networks; Radio signals; Sample size; Signal processing
• ISSN: 2076-3417; 2076-3417
• DOI: 10.3390/app13053177

The application of deep neural networks to address automatic modulation recognition (AMR) challenges has gained increasing popularity. Despite the outstanding capability of deep learning in automatic feature extraction, predictions based on low-data regimes with imbalanced classes of modulation signals generally result in low accuracy due to an insufficient number of training examples, which hinders the wide adoption of deep learning methods in practical applications of AMR. The identification of the minority class of samples can be crucial, as they tend to be of higher value. However, in AMR tasks, there is a lack of attention and effective solutions to the problem of Imbalanced-class in a low-data regime. In this work, we present a practical automatic data augmentation method for radio signals, called SigAugment, which incorporates eight individual transformations and effectively improves the performance of AMR tasks without additional searches. It surpasses existing data augmentation methods and mainstream methods for solving low-data and imbalanced-class problems on multiple datasets. By simply embedding SigAugment into the training pipeline of an existing model, it can achieve state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets and dramatically improve the classification accuracy of minority classes in the low-data imbalanced-class regime. SigAugment can be trained for uniform use on different types of models and datasets and works right out of the box.