Multi-Task Network for Time-Frequency Representation of Multicomponent Radar Signals

In space-air-ground integrated systems, radar signal analysis is crucial for effective spectrum management. In recent years, time-frequency transforms (TFT) have gained significant attention for radar signal detection and identification. However, challenges such as cross-term interference and low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) limit the effectiveness in multicomponent signal analysis. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel multitask learning-based TFT framework, named One-Stage TFT (OSTFT), which directly generates high-quality time-frequency representations (TFR) from raw in-phase and quadrature signals. OSTFT incorporates a generative network combined with classification and localization tasks to enhance feature extraction and image clarity. Experimental results demonstrate that OSTFT achieves superior performance in TFR quality and radar signal recognition, with an 81.4% detection rate using the You Only Look Once (YOLO) frame-work, outperforming existing TFT methods under various noise conditions. Compared to the best-performing TFR-denoising method, OSTFT improves the detection rate by 2.7%.