VC-SEI: Robust Variable-Channel Specific Emitter Identification Method Using Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation

Specific emitter identification (SEI) uses advanced techniques to identify radio equipment by analyzing unique characteristics in radio frequency signals. Recently, deep learning (DL) has been considered a promising tools for designing various intelligent SEI methods. This is primarily due to its ability to fully exploit hidden data features and make autonomous classification decisions, leading to effective performance. The existing DL-SEI methods are based on the availability of extensive labeled datasets, however, collecting and annotating such data is challenging and time-consuming in real-world scenarios. Furthermore, these datasets often contain both device-specific and irrelevant features, which limits the adaptability of models to fixed channels. To overcome these challenges, we propose a robust variable-channel SEI (VC-SEI) method. This method uses semantic consistency-powered semi-supervised domain adaptation (SSDA). We introduce domain adversarial training to ensure global semantic consistency (GSC), allowing the extraction of channel-irrelevant features. Additionally, we design two loss functions to maintain local semantic consistency (LSC) for extracting category-relevant features. This approach enables effective domain adaptation. Our SSDA-based VC-SEI method has been rigorously evaluated using the ORACLE RF fingerprinting datasets from 16 USRP X310 radios. When only 1% of training samples in the target domain are labeled, our method achieves 84.20% identification accuracy in the target domain and 92.00% identification accuracy in the source domain. These results surpass those of current state-of-the-art methods. Simulation results confirm the robust identification performance of our proposed VC-SEI method in both source and target domains across all scenarios. Our code can be downloaded from <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/frownean/VC-SEI-based-SSDA</uri>.