Leveraging Time–Frequency Distribution Priors and Structure-Aware Adaptivity for Wideband Signal Detection and Recognition in Wireless Communications

Wideband signal detection and recognition (WSDR) is considered an effective technical means for monitoring and analyzing spectra. The mainstream technical route involves constructing time-frequency representations for wideband sampled signals and then achieving signal detection and recognition through deep learning-based object detection models. However, existing methods exhibit insufficient attention on the prior information contained in the time-frequency domain and the structural features of signals, leaving ample room for further exploration and optimization. In this paper, we propose a novel model called TFDP-SANet for the WSDR task, which is based on time-frequency distribution priors and structure-aware adaptivity. Initially, considering the horizontal directionality and banded structure characteristics of the signal in the time-frequency representation, we introduce both the Strip Pooling Module (SPM) and Coordinate Attention (CA) mechanism during the feature extraction and fusion stages. These components enable the model to aggregate long-distance dependencies along horizontal and vertical directions, mitigate noise interference outside local windows, and enhance focus on the spatial distributions and shape characteristics of signals. Furthermore, we adopt an adaptive elliptical Gaussian encoding strategy to generate heatmaps, which enhances the adaptability of the effective guidance region for center-point localization to the target shape. During inference, we design a Time-Frequency Clustering Optimizer (TFCO) that leverages prior information to adjust the class of predicted bounding boxes, further improving accuracy. We conduct a series of ablation experiments and comparative experiments on the WidebandSig53 (WBSig53) dataset, and the results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing approaches on most metrics.