DFN-YOLO: Detecting Narrowband Signals in Broadband Spectrum

With the rapid development of wireless communication technologies and the increasing demand for efficient spectrum utilization, broadband spectrum sensing has become critical in both civilian and military fields. Detecting narrowband signals under broadband environments, especially under low-signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) conditions, poses significant challenges due to the complexity of time-frequency features and noise interference. To this end, this study presents a signal detection model named deformable feature-enhanced network-You Only Look Once (DFN-YOLO), specifically designed for blind signal detection in broadband scenarios. The DFN-YOLO model incorporates a deformable channel feature fusion network (DCFFN), replacing the concatenate-to-fusion (C2f) module to enhance the extraction and integration of channel features. The deformable attention mechanism embedded in DCFFN adaptively focuses on critical signal regions, while the loss function is optimized to the focal scaled intersection over union (Focal_SIoU), improving detection accuracy under low-SNR conditions. To support this task, a signal detection dataset is constructed and utilized to evaluate the performance of DFN-YOLO. The experimental results for broadband time-frequency spectrograms demonstrate that DFN-YOLO achieves a mean average precision (mAP50-95) of 0.850, averaged over IoU thresholds ranging from 0.50 to 0.95 with a step of 0.05, significantly outperforming mainstream object detection models such as YOLOv8, which serves as the benchmark baseline in this study. Additionally, the model maintains an average time estimation error within 5.55×10-5 s and provides preliminary center frequency estimation in the broadband spectrum. These findings underscore the strong potential of DFN-YOLO for blind signal detection in broadband environments, with significant implications for both civilian and military applications.