GAF-MAE: A Self-Supervised Automatic Modulation Classification Method Based on Gramian Angular Field and Masked Autoencoder
Yunhao Shi, Hua Xu, Yue Zhang, Zisen Qi, Dan Wang · IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications and Networking · 2023
With the development of deep learning (DL), several fields have ushered in leapfrog development, such as image classification and natural language processing. Combing the powerful feature extraction tool, DL-based Automatic Modulation Classification (AMC) emerges. However, most DL-based AMC methods require massive labeled samples for training, which is difficult for non-cooperative scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised AMC method called GAF-MAE. Gramian Angular Field (GAF) is applied for domain transformation from time series to images first, then a Masked Autoencoder (MAE) is built for self-supervised reconstruction tasks through unlabeled samples. After self-supervised pretrain, a small number of labeled samples are used for downstream classification finetuning. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of a public dataset RadioML.2016.10a. The simulation results show that GAF-MAE can achieve a relatively high average accuracy of 54.85% even if the label proportion is 5% and 61.38% when the label proportion reaches 100%, which outperforms other well-known models.