Automatic LPI Radar Waveform Recognition Using Vision Transformer

This paper investigates the classification of low probability of intercept (LPI) radar signals by exploiting the intrinsic advantages of the Vision Transformer (ViT). Due to the characteristics of LPI radar signals, such as intrapulse modulation, wide frequency bands, and low transmission power, these signals are challenging to be detected and classified using traditional analytic methods. This has led to the adoption of various deep learning techniques to overcome these limitations. On the one hand, the ViT, originally developed for natural language processing, has demonstrated outstanding performance in computer vision by replacing the structure of the convolutional neural network (CNN) with the transformer, specifically leveraging self-attention. Therefore, this paper explores a method based on the ViT technique for classifying LPI signal images. The simulation results show that the proposed ViT method outperforms the traditional CNN method by 12.8% at −10dB SNR.