A Time–Frequency Domain Analysis Method for Variable Frequency Hopping Signal

A variable frequency hopping (VFH) signal is a kind of frequency hopping (FH) signal that varies both in frequency and dwell time. However, in radio surveillance, the existing methods for unidentified signals using VFH cannot be effectively handled. In this paper, we proposed an improved joint analysis method based on time–frequency domain features, which adopts multi-level processing to solve the time–frequency domain feature analysis problem of the VFH signal. First, the received signal is pre-processed by Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) and binarization, and a highly discriminative time–frequency image is obtained; then, the fixed frequency signal is removed based on the feature of connected domains, and the conventional frequency hopping (CFH) signal is removed by density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN); finally, the overlapping region is cropped by the joint energy peak time–domain continuity properties. After the above multi-level joint processing method, the problem of VFH signal processing is effectively solved. The simulation result shows that the Mean Square Error (MSE) between the output results and the time–frequency image of the original VFH signal tends to be close to 0 when the Signal-to-Noise ratio (SNR) is 5 dB. © 2024 by the authors.