MixCTME: A Mixture of Convolutional Tsetlin Machine Experts Using Diverse Spectrogram Visualizations for Jamming Signal Classification

global navigation satellite systems (GNSSs) are vulnerable to jamming, which can degrade or even disable their services by interfering with signal reception. Such interference may interrupt GNSS positioning, navigation, timing, and communication functions. Therefore, robust jamming detection strategies are essential to ensure continuous and reliable services. Many existing jamming detection approaches use closed box machine learning (ML) models, which lack transparency and accuracy. In this article, we propose a novel mixture of convolutional Tsetlin machine experts (MixCTME) approach, using diverse spectrogram visualizations to enhance the accuracy and interpretability of jamming signal classification. To facilitate this, we collected raw in-phase and quadrature (IQ) data and named it the RealRFI dataset, which corresponds to ten different jamming classes. The data were collected through multiple radio-frequency interference (RFI) monitoring stations deployed at SINTEF companies across Europe and Scandinavia. Next, diverse visualizations were generated using short time Fourier transform (STFT), dominant frequency, fast Fourier transform (FFT), power spectral density, and standard deviation. These visualizations were binarized using the Otsu thresholding technique, and the binarized spectrograms were fed to the MixCTME model. Our method utilizes a combination of distinct convolutional Tsetlin machine (CTM) experts and employs a novel nonlinear technique, referred to as confidence-based gating, for weighting the experts’ inputs to make the final decision. We compared our method against state-of-the-art approaches via the self-collected and labeled dataset. Through experiments, our model achieved an accuracy of 90.70% on the collected data and 99.46% on a benchmark dataset, outperforming the state-of-the-art approaches. Additionally, we highlight the trustworthiness, scalability, and interpretability of the proposed approach, presenting a promising solution for accurate and interpretable jamming classification.