Open-world Radio Frequency Fingerprint Identification via Augmented Semi-supervised Learning

Abstract In complex electromagnetic environments, the identification and differentiation of diverse radio frequency (RF) emitters become particularly crucial. Existing RF fingerprinting methods demonstrate limitations when dealing with numerous unknown emitters, making it challenging for accurate classification and recognition. These limitations hinder the effective handling of specific unknown emitters.To address this issue, we introduce a novel RF fingerprinting method suitable for open-world conditions for the first time. We develop a novel RF fingerprinting model, Roinformer, to extract signal features with positional attention. We then leverage data augmentation strategies such as noise jitter and signal frame rearrangement to construct an effective pre-training model. Moreover, by incorporating instance-level similarity loss and a novel local entropy regularization approach, we significantly enhance the accuracy of known class identification and mitigate the catastrophic forgetting of known signal samples. Experimental results on three temporal signal datasets demonstrate that our method effectively recognizes both the known and unknown classes, outperforming several state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.