Cumulants-based radar specific emitter identification

In this paper we consider the problem of Radar Specific Emitter Identification (SEI) with the aim of distinguishing among several transmitting sources of the same kind which is a very hot topic in the device forensic field. At the design stage, we introduce a classification technique based on some suitable features evaluated from the cumulants of the signal emitted by the radar system. The devised features share some invariance properties which make them very attractive for the SEI problem. Hence, we use them as the input to a K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) classifier which performs the assignment of the emitter to a specific class. At the analysis stage, we assess the performance of the new system on a real dataset containing radar signals from three identical airborne emitters. The results highlight that a satisfactory classification performance is achieved.