Open Set Learning for RF-Based Drone Recognition via Signal Semantics

The abuse of drones has raised critical concerns about public security and personal privacy, bringing an urgent requirement for drone recognition. Existing radio frequency (RF)-based recognition methods follow the assumption of the closed set, resulting in the unknown signals being misclassified as known classes. To address this problem, we propose a Signal Semantic-based open Set Recognition (S3R) method in this paper. First, the short-time Fourier transform is introduced to construct the signal spectra, decoupling the drone signals with other interference signals. Then, we design a texture extractor and a position extractor to extract the texture features and position features from the spectra, respectively. The extracted features are further fused and structurally optimized to construct distinguishable signal semantics. Based on the structural characteristics of signal semantics, an outlier analysis-based semantic classifier is proposed, which searches the outliers of each known class in the closed set as the bounding thresholds to detect unknown instances. Finally, the detected unknown instances are further classified into their exact classes by implementing clustering in a new semantic space, where semantics are augmented by introducing basic features from the intermediate layers of the texture extractor. Besides, a real-world spectrogram dataset of commonly-used drones is released, which includes 24 classes and covers 7 brands. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed S3R method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and generalizability for both the closed set and the open set.