Specific emitter identification (SEI) is a professional technology to recognize different emitters by measuring the unique features of received signals. It has been widely used in both civilian and military fields. Recently, many SEI methods based on deep learning have been proposed, most of which assume that the training set and testing set have the same data distribution. However, in reality, the testing set is generally used later than the training set and lacks labels. The long time span may change the signal transmission environment and fingerprint features. These changes result in considerable differences in data distribution between the training and testing sets, thereby affecting the recognition and prediction abilities of the model. Therefore, the existing works cannot achieve satisfactory results for a long time span SEI. To address this challenge and obtain stable fingerprints, we transform the long time span SEI problem into a domain adaptive problem and propose an unsupervised domain adaptive method called LTS-SEI. Noteworthily, LTS-SEI uses a multilayer convolutional feature extractor to learn feature knowledge and confronts a domain discriminator to generate domain-invariant shallow fingerprints. The classifier of LTS-SEI applies feature matching to source domain samples and target domain samples to achieve the domain alignment of deep fingerprints. The classifier further reduces the intraclass diversity of deep features to alleviate the misclassification problem of edge samples in the target domain. To confirm the effectiveness and reliability of LTS-SEI, we collect multiple sets of real satellite navigation signals using two antennas with 13 m- and 40 m-large apertures, respectively, and construct two available datasets. Numerous experiments demonstrate that LTS–SEI can considerably increase the recognition accuracy of the long time span SEI and is superior to the other existing methods.

As a basic task and key link of space situational awareness, space target recognition has become crucial in threat analysis, communication reconnaissance and electronic countermeasures. Using the fingerprint features carried by the electromagnetic signal to recognize is an effective method. Because traditional radiation source recognition technologies are difficult to obtain satisfactory expert features, automatic feature extraction methods based on deep learning have become popular. Although many deep learning schemes have been proposed, most of them are only used to solve the inter-class separable problem and ignore the intra-class compactness. In addition, the openness of the real space may invalidate the existing closed-set recognition methods. In order to solve the above problems, inspired by the application of prototype learning in image recognition, we propose a novel method for recognizing space radiation sources based on a multi-scale residual prototype learning network (MSRPLNet). The method can be used for both the closed- and open-set recognition of space radiation sources. Furthermore, we also design a joint decision algorithm for an open-set recognition task to identify unknown radiation sources. To verify the effectiveness and reliability of the proposed method, we built a set of satellite signal observation and receiving systems in a real external environment and collected eight Iridium signals. The experimental results show that the accuracy of our proposed method can reach 98.34% and 91.04% for the closed- and open-set recognition of eight Iridium targets, respectively. Compared to similar research works, our method has obvious advantages.

Specific emitter identification (SEI), which classifies radio transmitters by extracting hardware-intrinsic radio frequency fingerprints (RFFs), faces critical challenges in noise robustness, generalization under limited training data and class imbalance. To address these limitations, we propose adaptive deep ensemble learning (ADEL)—a framework that integrates heterogeneous neural networks including convolutional neural networks (CNN), multilayer perception (MLP) and transformer for hierarchical feature extraction. Crucially, ADEL also adopts adaptive weighted predictions of the three base classifiers based on reconstruction errors and hybrid losses for robust classification. The methodology employs (1) three heterogeneous neural networks for robust feature extraction; (2) the hybrid losses refine feature space structure and preserve feature integrity for better feature generalization; and (3) collaborative decision-making via adaptive weighted reconstruction errors of the base learners for precise inference. Extensive experiments are performed to validate the effectiveness of ADEL. The results indicate that the proposed method significantly outperforms other competing methods. ADEL establishes a new SEI paradigm through robust feature extraction and adaptive decision integrity, enabling potential deployment in space target identification and situational awareness under limited training samples and imbalanced classes conditions.

Specific Emitter Identification (SEI) is a specialized technique for identifying different emitters by analyzing the unique characteristics embedded in received signals, known as Radio Frequency Fingerprints (RFFs), and SEI plays a crucial role in civilian applications. Recently, various SEI methods based on deep learning have been proposed. However, in real-world scenarios, the scarcity of accurately labeled data poses a significant challenge to these methods, which typically rely on large-scale supervised training. To address this issue, we propose a novel SEI framework based on self-supervised contrastive learning. Our approach comprises two stages: an unsupervised pretraining phase that uses contrastive loss to learn discriminative RFF representations from unlabeled data, and a supervised fine-tuning stage regularized through virtual adversarial training (VAT) to improve generalization under limited labels. This framework enables effective feature learning while mitigating overfitting. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we collected real-world satellite navigation signals using a 40-meter antenna and conducted extensive experiments. The results demonstrate that our approach achieves outstanding SEI performance, significantly outperforming several mainstream SEI methods, thereby highlighting the practical potential of contrastive self-supervised learning in satellite transmitter identification.

Communication signals have many modulation types in the current complex electromagnetic environment, so it is more and more difficult to recognize them accurately. Extracting features from different dimensions can describe the essence of the signals in different aspects and better distinguish various signal modulation formats. However, there may be features with poor anti-noise performance, irrelevant features and redundant features in the original high-dimensional feature set, which not only reduce the recognition probability of the signals but also make the feature selection space grow exponentially. Aiming at the problem of multi-dimensional feature selection of communication signals, this paper proposes a two-stage hybrid feature selection method based on combined scoring and improved binary whale optimization algorithm. In the first stage, the method uses the combined algorithm to initially filter the extracted signal features, and in the second stage, the improved binary whale optimization algorithm is used for further optimization. The results show that, compared with the original feature set, this method can increase the average recognition probability of the signals by up to 17%, and the feature reduction rate up to 81%. Besides, we prove that the proposed algorithm has certain generalization ability for different signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and classifiers.