IRelNet: An Improved Relation Network for Few-Shot Radar Emitter Identification

In future electronic warfare (EW), there will be many unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with electronic support measure (ESM) systems, which will often encounter the challenge of radar emitter identification (REI) with few labeled samples. To address this issue, we propose a novel deep learning network, IRelNet, which could be easily embedded in the computer system of a UAV. This network was designed with channel attention, spatial attention and skip-connect features, and meta-learning technology was applied to solve the REI problem. IRelNet was trained using simulated radar emitter signals and can effectively extract the essential features of samples in a new task, allowing it to accurately predict the class of the emitter to be identified. Furthermore, this work provides a detailed description of how IRelNet embedded in a UAV was applied in the EW scene and verified its effectiveness via experiments. When the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) was 4 dB, IRelNet achieved an identification accuracy of greater than 90% on the samples in the test task.