Machine Learning Empowered Radio Frequency Signal Classification for UAS Detection

Abstract

Rapid developments in the unmanned aerial systems (UAS) have made its usage in a variety of offensive as well as defensive applications especially in military, high priority and sensitive government sites. The ability to accurately classify over-the-air radio signals will provide insights into spectrum utilization, device fingerprinting and protocol identification. These insights can aid estimating the UAS transmitters capabilities without their knowledge. In this paper, we present a Radio Frequency Signal Classification (RF-Class) toolbox that can monitor, detect, and classify wireless signals emitted by UAS. The advantage of the RF-Class toolbox is extracting information about transmitters and providing receivers information about certain transmitted signals. The classification of RF signals will be done based on the modulation scheme recognition, exploitation of cyclostationary features and leveraging RF band allocation information. The modulation recognition capability can also be used for cyber offensive strategies. Once the modulation scheme is recognized, we can demodulate, decode and extract packets. Once the packets are extracted, we can accurately detect the protocol. The final step involves crafting a malicious packet and injecting the packet in the adversarial communication environment with intent to launch offensive operations. To demo the feasibility and accuracy of our approach, we have evaluated the performance on a real environment with an UAS (Drone - DJI Phantom 4). Our initial experimental result showed that we were able to detect presence of drone signal successfully in presence of varying SNR regimes.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Apr 30, 2021
Accession Number
AD1152146

Entities

People

  • Charles Kamhoua
  • Kimberly Gold
  • Michael Nilsen
  • Sachin Shetty

Organizations

  • Naval Surface Warfare Center
  • United States Army Research Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Autonomy
  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Algorithms
  • Classification
  • Computational Science
  • Data Processing
  • Data Sets
  • Detection
  • Feature Extraction
  • Frequency
  • Frequency Bands
  • Learning
  • Machine Learning
  • Modulation
  • Multiple Input Multiple Output
  • Network Science
  • Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing
  • Radio Equipment
  • Radio Frequency
  • Recognition
  • Signal Detection
  • Signal Processing
  • Simulations
  • Software Defined Radio
  • Surface Warfare
  • Test Methods
  • Unmanned Aerial Systems

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Neural Network Machine Learning.
  • Radio communications and signal processing.
  • Sensor Fusion and Tracking Systems.

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Autonomous Systems
  • Autonomy
  • Autonomy - UAVs
  • Cyber
  • Cyber - Quantum