Overcoming Data Limitations: A Few-Shot Specific Emitter Identification Method Using Self-Supervised Learning and Adversarial Augmentation

Specific emitter identification (SEI) based on radio frequency fingerprinting (RFF) is a physical layer authentication method in the field of wireless network security. RFFs are unique features embedded in the electromagnetic waves, which come from the hard imperfections in the wireless devices. Deep learning has been applied to many SEI tasks due to its powerful feature extraction capabilities. However, the success of most methods hinges on massive and labeled samples, and few methods focus on a realistic scenario, where few samples are available and labeled. In this paper, to overcome data limitations, we propose a few-shot SEI (FS-SEI) method based on self-supervised learning and adversarial augmentation (SA2SEI). Specifically, to overcome the limitation of label dependence for auxiliary dataset, a novelty adversarial augmentation (Adv-Aug)-powered self-supervised learning is designed to pre-train a RFF extractor using unlabeled auxiliary dataset. Subsequently, to overcome the limitation of sample dependence, knowledge transfer is introduced to fine-tune the extractor and a classifier with target dataset including few samples (5-30 samples per emitter in this paper) and corresponding labels. In addition, auxiliary dataset and target dataset are come from different emitters. An open-source large-scale real-world automatic-dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) dataset and a Wi-Fi dataset are used to evaluate the proposed SA2SEI method. The simulation results show that the proposed method can extract more discriminative RFF features and obtain higher identification performance in the FS-SEI. Specifically, when there are only 5 samples per Wi-Fi device, it can achieve 83.40% identification accuracy, in which 38.63% identification accuracy improvement comes from the Adv-Aug of pre-training process. The codes are available at https://github.com/LIUC000/SA2SEI.