Modulation Recognition for Incomplete signals
through Dictionary Learning
Guangcheng Lu, Kezhong Zhang, Sai Huang, Yifan Zhang, Zhiyong Feng
Wireless Technology Innovation Institute(WTI),
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications,
Beijing, P.R.China, 100876
Email: {luguangcheng, zhangkz, huangsai, zhangyf, fengzy}@bupt.edu.cn
Abstract—The automatic recognition of modulation type for
a detected signal is a significant task in wireless communica-
tion, which is the intermediate step between signal detection
and demodulation. There are two general methods adopted in
modulation recognition, i.e., likelihood-based (LB) method and
feature-based (FB) method. Both LB and FB approach do not
perform well when the signals are incomplete and received from
a very limited number of observations. Therefore, we adopt a
method based on dictionary learning to identify the modulation
type of incomplete signals. The orthogonal matching pursuit
(OMP) method is used to obtain the sparse representation and
the sequential generalization of K-means (SGK) method is used
to update the dictionary set. The experimental result shows that
the recognition accuracy of our method is much higher, compared
with the method based on higher-order cumulant.
Index Terms—Incomplete signals, modulation recognition, dic-
tionary learning
I. INTRODUCTION
The automatic recognition of modulation type for a detected
signal is a significant task in wireless communication, which
is the intermediate step between signal detection and demod-
ulation. The goal of modulation recognition is to estimate
the modulation types and other parameters of the transmitted
signals by observing the received data samples, which would
be useful for further signal analyzing and processing.
There are two general classes of method [1] : likelihood-
based (LB) method [2][3] and feature-based (FB) method
[4][5]. The former is based on the likelihood function of
the received signal and makes the decision by comparing the
likelihood ratio against a threshold. A solution offered by the
LB methods is optimal in the Bayesian sense, viz., it minimizes
the probability of false classification. The optimal solution
suffers from computational complexity, which often gives rise
to suboptimal classifiers. In the FB approach, on the other
hand, several features are usually employed and a decision
is made based on their observed values. In most cases, FB
approach relies on defining and extracting a set of features
that, intuitively, look as an optimum set. The main methods
of the LB and FB method are illustrated in Table. I.
However, both LB and FB approach do not perform well
when the signals are incomplete and received from a very
limited number of observations. The LB approach is valid
when the number of modulation candidates is finite and is
based on composite hypotheses testing [6]. Therefore, incom-
TABLE I
LB METHODS AND FB METHODS
LB methods
average likelihood ratio test
generalized likelihood ratio test
hybrid likelihood ratio test
FB methods
entropy
fuzzy logic
a moment matrix technique
constellation shape
plete signal with no prior knowledge available is difficult to
identify through the LB method. On the other hand, the FB
approach adopts the pattern recognition method to classify
the modulation type. However, features of incomplete signals
are not similar to the complete signals, especially in the
blind environment. Dictionary learning based which is the
combination of LB and FB approach performs well in the
modulation recognition of incomplete signals.
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the
study of the sparse representation of signals [7]. Using an
overcomplete dictionary that contains prototype signal-atoms,
signals are described by sparse linear combinations of these
atoms. Let D denotes the dictionary set and x is the coefficient
vectors. There are two steps of dictionary learning, i.e. sparse
representation and dictionary update. In the first step, D is
kept constant and search the sparse representation x. After
the sparse representation x is obtained. The dictionary set D
should learn from the statements of received signals.
Previous literature adopted two main methods to obtain
sparse representation. Gersho et. al [8] and Krishnamurthy
et. al [9] adopt the clustering based method that the distances
between received signals and dictionary atoms are compared.
This method is widely used in the vector quantization (VQ)
achieved by clustering algorithms. Since each signal is rep-
resented by only one atom, the sparse approximation step
becomes trivial. Therefore, clustering based method cannot
separate the aliasing signals and is not used in our method. An-
other method is greedy algorithms such as the matching pursuit
(MP) proposed by Mallat et.al in [10] and the orthogonal MP
(OMP) proposed by Tropp et.al in [11]. Due to orthogonal,
the OMP update step will only consider each variable once,
978-1-5090-4183-1/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE