A Deep Convolutional Network for Multitype Signal Detection and Classification in Spectrogram

Wideband signal detection is an important problem in wireless communication. With the rapid development of deep learning (DL) technology, some DL-based methods are applied to wireless communication and have shown great potential. In this paper, we present a novel neural network for detecting signals and classifying signal types in wideband spectrograms. Our network utilizes the key point estimation to locate the rough centerline of the signal region and recognize its class. Then, several regressions are carried out to obtain properties, including the local offset and the border offsets of a bounding box, which are further synthesized for a more fine location. Experimental results demonstrate that our method performs more accurate than other DL-based object detection methods previously employed for the same task. In addition, our method runs obviously faster than existing methods, and it abandons the candidate anchors, which make it more favorable for real-time applications.