A Transformer-Based Spatiotemporal Fusion Network for Automatic Modulation Classification

Automatic modulation classification (AMC) suffers from performance degradation under low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions, where modulation characteristics are affected by noise and signals belonging to the same modulation family exhibit similar feature representations. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a Transformer-based spatiotemporal fusion network that jointly exploits local spatial waveform characteristics and temporal dependency information while leveraging the global context modeling capability of the Transformer to integrate complementary multi-dimensional features. The proposed architecture improves feature representation capability under different SNR conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves improved classification performance compared with comparative approaches under different SNR conditions. In particular, it achieves an overall classification accuracy of 82.45% over the SNR range from −10 to 18 dB, and an average accuracy of 95.55% at SNRs of 2 dB and above, showing improved classification performance in the low-to-medium SNR transition region.