Symbol State Transition Entropy: A Novel Feature of Interpulse Radio Frequency Modulation Signal

In radar electronic warfare (EW) reconnaissance, radio frequency (RF) is an important parameter for describing the received pulse, and it is usually used in sorting and identifying radar signals. In order to achieve different detection purposes, different modulations are used in intra-pulse and interpulse radar signals. It is an important frequency modulation mode in radar signals for interpulse frequency modulation, which describes the characteristics of dynamic changes of radar pulse signals. However, it is difficult to describe these characteristics effectively by only using Pulse Description Word(PDW). In this letter, a novel feature, based on symbolization and entropy, is proposed to characterize interpulse frequency modulation characteristics of radar signals. Simulation results show that the proposed feature not only have an excellent performance of describing interpulse RF modulation radar signals, but is also insensitive to the environment with a certain rate of pulses missing and spurious pulses. Besides, in terms of time complexity, it also has a satisfactory performance.