Biologically Inspired Radio Signal Feature Extraction with Sparse Denoising Autoencoders

Automatic modulation classification (AMC) is an important task for modern communication systems; however, it is a challenging problem when signal features and precise models for generating each modulation may be unknown. We present a new biologically-inspired AMC method without the need for models or manually specified features --- thus removing the requirement for expert prior knowledge. We accomplish this task using regularized stacked sparse denoising autoencoders (SSDAs). Our method selects efficient classification features directly from raw in-phase/quadrature (I/Q) radio signals in an unsupervised manner. These features are then used to construct higher-complexity abstract features which can be used for automatic modulation classification. We demonstrate this process using a dataset generated with a software defined radio, consisting of random input bits encoded in 100-sample segments of various common digital radio modulations. Our results show correct classification rates of > 99% at 7.5 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and > 92% at 0 dB SNR in a 6-way classification test. Our experiments demonstrate a dramatically new and broadly applicable mechanism for performing AMC and related tasks without the need for expert-defined or modulation-specific signal information.