Radar UAV/Bird Trajectory Feature Classification Based on TCN-Transformer and the PC-TimeGAN Data Augmentation Framework

To address the challenges of scarce unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) track samples, severe class imbalance, and high motion similarity between UAVs and birds in low-altitude radar recognition, this paper proposes a trajectory classification method integrating a TCN-Transformer model with a physics-constrained TimeGAN (PC-TimeGAN) data augmentation framework. Specifically, the PC-TimeGAN generates high-quality, kinematically compliant UAV trajectories to alleviate data scarcity and class imbalance. A multi-scale TCN-Transformer is then constructed to comprehensively extract features, utilizing multi-kernel dilated convolutions for local temporal correlations and self-attention mechanisms for global temporal dependencies, thereby improving the discrimination between UAV and bird trajectories with similar motion patterns. Furthermore, a joint loss function combining Focal Loss and Triplet Loss is employed to optimize the decision boundaries and feature space, enhancing model robustness and generalization. Experiments on a measured dataset demonstrate that, under the 15-dimensional input setting, the proposed method achieves a UAV recall of 80.00%, an FAR of 3.15%, a precision of 64.00%, and an F1-score of 0.7111. Compared to baseline methods (e.g., SVM, LSTM, GRU, Transformer, and 1D-CNN), the proposed approach significantly improves UAV recall under limited trajectory information while keeping the false-alarm rate of misclassifying birds as UAVs low. Ultimately, this method markedly enhances the comprehensive performance of rapid track-level target classification for low-altitude surveillance radars.