Electronic Warfare: Issues and Challenges for Emitter Classification

Electronic warfare (EW) is an important capability that provides advantage to defence forces over their adversaries. Defence forces gather tactical intelligence through EW sensors, which provide the means to counter hostile actions of enemy forces. Functions of an EW system is threat detection and the area surveillance so as to determine the identity of surrounding emitters. Emitter classification system identifies possible threats by analysing intercepted signals. Problem of identifying emitters based on its intercepted signal characteristics is a challenging problem in electronic warfare studies. Major issues and challenges for emitter classification such as drifting of emitter parameters due to aging, operational characteristic of an emitter, i.e., same emitter can operate on multiple bands and multiple pulse repetition frequencies (PRFs) are highlighted. A novel approach based on some well-known statistical methods, e.g., regression analysis, hypothesis testing, and discriminent analysis is proposed. The effectiveness of the proposed approach has been tested over ELINT (Electronic Intelligence) data and illustrated using simulation data. The proposed approach can play a solution for wide variety of problems in emitter classification in electronic warfare studies.