JR-TFViT: A Lightweight Efficient Radar Jamming Recognition Network Based on Global Representation of the Time–Frequency Domain

Efficient jamming recognition capability is a prerequisite for radar anti-jamming and can enhance the survivability of radar in electronic warfare. Traditional recognition methods based on manually designed feature parameters have found it difficult to cope with the increasingly complex electromagnetic environment, and research combining deep learning to achieve jamming recognition is gradually increasing. However, existing research on radar jamming recognition based on deep learning can ignore the global representation in the jamming time–frequency domain data, while not paying enough attention to the problem of lightweighting the recognition network itself. Therefore, this paper proposes a lightweight jamming recognition network (JR-TFViT) that can fuse the global representation of jamming time–frequency domain data while combining the advantages of the Vision Transformer and a convolutional neural network (CNN). The global representation and local information in the jamming time–frequency data are fused with the assistance of the multi-head self-attention (MSA) mechanism in the transformer to improve the feature extraction capabilities of the recognition network. The model’s parameters are further decreased by modifying the standard convolutional operation mechanism and substituting the convolutional operation needed by the network with Ghost convolution, which has less parameters. The experimental results show that the JR-TFViT requires fewer model parameters while maintaining higher recognition performance than mainstream convolutional neural networks and lightweight CNNs. For 12 types of radar jamming, the JR-TFViT achieves 99.5% recognition accuracy at JNR = −6 dB with only 3.66 M model parameters. In addition, 98.9% recognition accuracy is maintained when the JR-TFViT parameter number is further compressed to 0.67 M.