JOURNAL OF ELECTRONIC SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 10, NO.

2, JUNE 2012

163

Automatic Recognition Algorithm of AM Signals Based on Spectrum and Modulation Characters

Xiao-Fei Zhang, Liang Chang, Pei-Ming Ren, and Rong Liu
AbstractTo meet the actual requirement of automatic monitoring of the shortwave signals under wide band ranges, a technique for automatic recognition is studied in this paper. And basing upon the spectrum and modulation characters of amplitude modulation (AM) signals, an automatic recognition scheme for AM signals is proposed. The proposed scheme is achieved by a joint judgment with four different characteristic parameters. Experiment results indicate that the proposed scheme can effectively recognize AM signals in practice. Index TermsAmplitude modulation, automatic recognition, characteristic parameters, shortwave radio. identification and an AM signal recognition scheme based on characteristic parameters is proposed in this section. In Section 3, simulation results and analysis are presented. Finally, Section 4 concludes this paper.

2. Algorithm for AM signal Identification

In this section, the theoretical analysis on AM recognition algorithms is illustrated in detail. To introduce recognition algorithms, four characteristic parameters are taken into consideration. Finally, a new scheme for AM signal sorting is proposed. 2.1 Power Spectrum Symmetry Considering that some signals show a certain sort of symmetry on spectrum distribution at the range of its 3 dB bandwidth, a power spectrum symmetry equation[5] can be defined as
S1 = PL P U PL + P U

1. Introduction
Nowadays a lot of studies have been devoted to the algorithms for modulation recognition of analog signals. In [1] to [8], a series of parameters based on the instantaneous amplitude and phase were proposed to identify the different modulation types: amplitude modulation (AM), single side band (SSB), frequency modulation (FM), double side band (DSB), and so on. However, the situation in the modulation recognition algorithms mentioned above and that in the actual application are different. Furthermore, digital signals are usually accrued in the shortwave bands. Therefore, a lot of tasks should be done to this field. A new AM signal recognition scheme is proposed in this paper. The scheme is based on the spectrum and modulation characters of AM signals. In this way, a fast recognition of AM signals can be obtained by characteristic parameters calculation. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can effectively improve the performance of automatic AM sorting work. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 demonstrates a theoretical analysis for AM signal
Manuscript received May 31, 2012; revised June 11, 2011; presented at 2012 2nd International Conference on Signal, Image Processing and Applications, Hong Kong, August 34, 2012. X.-F. Zhang, L. Chang, P.-M. Ren, and R. Liu are with State Radio Monitoring Center, Beijing 100027, China (e-mail: zhang.x.f@srrc.org.cn; changliang@srrc.org.cn; peimean@163.com; liurongrr@sina.com). Digital Object Identifier: 10.3969/j.issn.1674-862X.2012.02.013

(1)

where PL and PU are the upper and lower bands of power spectrum, which are symmetrical about the center frequency. Since these parameters can be used to measure the symmetrical degree of the overall spectrum, symmetrical signals can be easily distinguished from unsymmetrical signals by S1. The value of S1 is inversely proportional to symmetry. It is known that signals, like AM, Morse, and single carrier, do show good symmetry. However, sometimes the highest amplitude of phase shift keying (PSK) and frequence shift keying (FSK) maybe just located in the center of the whole spectrum. Taking everything mentioned above into account, the threshold is usually set around 0.1 to 0.2. 2.2 Maximum Difference Based on the Normalized Power Spectrum Symmetry In comparison with the parameters S1, the parameter S2 is used to further describe the symmetry of spectrum distribution, which can be recognized as a stricter parameter. The mathematical formulation of this different symmetry relationship is described by

164
1 1.0 0.9 0.9

JOURNAL OF ELECTRONIC SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 10, NO. 2, JUNE 2012

Normalized amplitude

0.8 0.8 0.7 0.7 0.6 0.6 0.5 0.5 0.4 0.4 0.3 0.3 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0

signals. Additionally, the computational complexity of parameter S2 is very high. However, both the reliability and the computational complexity can be greatly improved by a joint judgment with the parameter S1. Usually, if the value of parameter S1 is above the given threshold, it can be judged that the signal is none of AM, Morse, and CW. On the contrary, we need the parameter S2 for further judgment. Once the value of parameter S2 is less than the set threshold, it is sure that the filtered signals are one of these three signals.
0.5

00 0

0.5

1 1

1.5 1.5

2 2

2.5 3 2.5 3 t (s104) (a)

3.5 3.5

4 4

4.5 4.5

x 10

5 5 4

0.9 0.9

Normalized amplitude

0.8 0.8 0.7 0.7 0.6 0.6 0.5 0.5 0.4 0.4 0.3 0.3 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0 0 2.5

2.5

3.5 3.5

4.5 4 4.5 4 t (s10 ) (b)

5.5 5.5

x 10

1 1.0 0.9 0.9

Normalized amplitude

0.8 0.8 0.7 0.7 0.6 0.6 0.5 0.5 0.4 0.4 0.3 0.3 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0

0 0 0

2 2

4 4

6 6 t (s104) (c)

8 8

10 10

x 10

12 12 4

Fig. 1. Instantaneous amplitude of various signals after filtering: (a) CW signal, (b) MORSE signal, and (c) AM signal.

S2 = max {S ( n + k ) S ( n k )}

(2)

where S(n) is the maximum value of the spectrum center, S(n+k) and S(nk) (k=1, 2, , n1) are respectively represent the left amplitude and right amplitude. The basic ideal of parameter S2 is similar to that of parameter S1. It extracts the largest amplitude differences of the normalized power spectrum symmetry in order to avoid the presence of outliers. By this way, the symmetrical signals are easily sorted. In the ideal case, the parameter S2 can strictly distinguish AM, Morse, and carrier waves (CW) from other

2.3 Statistics based on Instantaneous Amplitude Distribution After filtering signals by parameters S1 and S2, the remaining signals may be one of AM, Morse, and CW. Another parameter S3 is used to distinguish Morse from AM and CW signals. The Morse signal is a turn-off signal while the AM and CW signals are constant signals, so the distinction can be caused by the different forms of amplitude distribution. There is a pretreatment in the experiment. Since the bandwidth of Morse signal is very narrow, it is filtered by adopting a very narrow band-pass filter to minimize the impact of noise. The bandwidth herein is set to 20 Hz. After filtering, the instantaneous amplitude of different signals are shown as Fig. 1. It can be seen from Fig. 1 that the CW signal is basically turned to be a constant envelope signal after filtering. On the contrary, the envelope of the AM signal is not constant and it changes slowly. At the same time, Morse signal shows an apparent turn-off feature. So the three signals can be distinguished by different amplitude distributions. The Morse signal can be separated from AM and CW signals by computing amplitude distribution statistics. In this experiment, the normalized amplitude is divided into M intervals, and the total amplitude distribution number in each interval can be denoted as N1, N2, , NM. For the Morse signal, it is in the off state for nearly half of the time. So the number of N1, which belongs to the lowest value, should be the largest. But there is no such feature for AM and CW signals. Therefore, the Morse signal can be easily identified by counting whether the interval with the largest number of points corresponds to the lowest amplitude interval, that is
S3 = arg max {n ( N i )}

(3)

where n is the number of points whose corresponding amplitudes are in the interval Ni, the function arg max{} means the value of i when n gets the maximum value. So, when S3=1, the signal is surly to be Morse, otherwise it may be AM or CW signals alternatively.
2.4 Constant Envelope Feature Parameter For AM and CW signals, we can distinguish them by

ZHANG et al.: Automatic Recognition Algorithm of AM Signals based on Spectrum and Modulation Characters

165

judging whether it is a constant envelope signal. Setting a constant envelope signal as {Sa(k)}, the parameter S4 can be defined as
S 4 = Var {Sa ( k )}

Table 2: Judgment result of S2

SNR TYPE AM FSK PSK CW SSB MORSE No. 0 4 5 1 2 1 >=T 3 0 0 4 0 1 0 dB <T 0 4 5 1 2 1 >=T 3 0 0 4 0 1 5 dB <T 0 4 5 1 2 1 3 0 0 4 0 1 10 dB >=T <T 0 4 5 1 2 1

(4)

where Var{} means the variance operator. The threshold is set to be 0.1. If S4 is larger than the threshold, the signal modulation can be judged as AM. According to the aforementioned analysis, this paper proposes an AM signal recognition scheme based on characteristic parameters. Fig. 2 illustrates the flow of the proposed scheme. It is worth noting that this is one possible scheme, we need to adopt specific process according to the characteristics of practical signals. For example, we can extend the processing time to make a repetitive judgment to improve the reliability.

Table 3: Judgment result of S3

SNR TYPE AM CW MORSE No. 3 2 2 =T 0 0 2 0 dB >T 3 2 0 =T 0 0 2 5 dB >T 3 2 0 =T 0 0 2 10 dB >T 3 2 0

3. Simulation Results
In this section, 22 signals are tested in the experiment. The modulation type of these signals includes 8-channel quaternary phase shift keying (QPSK), CW, upper sideband (USB), FSK, AM, SSB, and Morse. As the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the acquired signals is relatively high, we can add noise in order to access each parameter. The thresholds (T) of parameters 1, 2, and 4 are set to 0.05, 0.2, and 0.1, respectively. As is shown in Table 1, the SNR is set to 0 dB, 5 dB and 10 dB, respectively. Then we can obtain the number of each signal with different SNR. Meanwhile, for each SNR, we will get two statistics: one with the threshold T, the other with the threshold <T.
AM/MORSE/SSB/PSK /FSK/Multi-carrier,and so on

Table 4: Judgment result of S4

SNR TYPE AM CW No. 3 2 >=T 0 0 0 dB <T 3 2 >=T 0 0 5 dB <T 3 2 0 0 10 dB >=T <T 3 2

Parameter S1 Parameter S1

Thre>Threshold shold 1 1

<Thre>Threshold 2 2 AM/MORSE/ shold CW

<Thres < Threhold 11 shold Parameter S2 Parameter S2

SSB/PSK/ FSK/Multicarrier

It can be seen from Table 1 and Table 2 that these two parameters can exclude all the other signals except AM, Morse, and CW. The whole performance of S2 is better than S1, but S1 can effectively distinguish the Morse signal. In addition, the results are identical when SNR is set to three different values, which can explain that the characteristic difference of the signal itself determines the filtering result when SNR is not very low. It can be seen from Table 3 and Table 4 that CW and Morse signals can be excluded within a relatively low SNR. From the whole judgment results, the scheme proposed by this paper can well distinguish the AM signal form other practical signals, even under low SNR.

Thre>Threshold 2 shold 2

4. Conclusions
Threshold 4
CW

Parameter S3 Parameter S3

Value !=1 Value!=1

AM/CW

Parameter S4 Parameter S4

Value=1 Value=1

>Thre>Threshold 4 shold 4
AM

>Threshold 4

MORSE Morse

Fig. 2. AM signal recognition scheme. Table 1: Judgment result of S1

SNR Type AM FSK PSK CW SSB MORSE No. 3 4 5 5 2 2 >=T 0 2 2 3 1 0 0 dB <T 3 2 3 2 1 2 >=T 0 2 2 3 1 0 5 dB <T 3 2 3 2 1 2 10 dB >=T 0 2 2 3 1 0 <T 3 2 3 2 1 2

In this paper, an AM recognition scheme is proposed to meet the needs of automatic monitoring task in high frequency (HF). Simulation results show that a significant improvement of performance has been achieved for practical signals. Further more, this scheme can be incorporated as an important part in the monitoring system of shortwave radio.

References
[1] J. Wei, Research for low SNR recognition method, M.S. thesis, Taiyuan University of Technology, Taiyuan, China, 2008 (in Chinese). N. Lu, Research for modulation recognition and signal feature extraction, M.S. thesis, Xidian University, Xian, China, 2008 (in Chinese).

[2]

166

JOURNAL OF ELECTRONIC SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 10, NO. 2, JUNE 2012

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]

[7]

[8]

N Alyaoui, H. B. Hnia, A. Kachouri, and M. Samet, The modulation recognition approaches for software radio, in Proc. of the 2nd Int. Conf. on Signals, Circuits and Systems, Monastir, 2008, pp. 15. H.-Z. Guo, Realization for key algorithm of communication signal recognition system, M.S. thesis, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, 2010 (in Chinese). A K Nandi and E E Azzouz, Algorithms for automatic modulation recognition of communication signals, IEEE Trans. on Communications, vol. 46, no. 4, pp. 431436, 1998. R.-H. Zhang, Automatic recognition of communication signal modulation, M.S. thesis, Hebei University, Wuhan, China, 2009 (in Chinese). S.-Y. Peng, D.-Q. Kong, and D. Liu. Research of Modulation identification algorithm, Machinery & Electronics, no. 17, pp. 8586, Jan. 2010. H.-P Tao, Research of Communication signal modulation format identification, M.S. thesis, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin, China, 2005 (in Chinese). Xiao-Fei Zhang was born in Henan Province, China in 1978. He received the B.S. degree and M.S degree from the Beijing University of Technology in 2000 and 2006, respectively, both in electrical engineering. He is currenly working with the State Radio Monitoring Center as a senior engineer. His research interests include VHF/UHF monitoring and interference location technologies.

Liang Chang was born in Beijing, China in 1981. He received the B.S. degree and the Ph.D. degree from Tsinghua University in 2003 and 2008, respectively, both in electrical engineering. He is currenly working with the State Radio Monitoring Center as a senior engineer. His research interests include signal processing in spectrum monitoring and satellite monitoring thechnologies.

Pei-Ming Ren was born in Shanxi Province, China in 1985. He received the B.S. degree and M.S. degree from the Communication University of China (CUC), Beijing in 2009 and 2011, respectively. He is currenly working with the State Radio Monitoring Center as an assistant engineer. His research interests include spectrum monitoring, signal processing, and imaging processing.

Rong Liu was born in Hubei Province, China in 1986. She received the B.S. degree from the Hefei University of Technology (HFUT), Hefei in 2009 and the M.S. degree from Beijing Jiaotong University (BJTU), Beijing in 2011. She is currenly working with the State Radio Monitoring Center as an assistant engineer. Her research interests include signal processing and information theory.