The scope of this thesis is to implement radar emitter emulator in a low cost, portablehardware for operational and educational purposes. The model enables pulse train generation in real environment belonging to radar emitters for military exercises. The motivation comes from another research area which is to design effective algorithms for deinterleaving mixed pulse sequences in a suitable hardware and this thesis, covers the work done for implementing a hardware that generates mixed pulse sequences. First of all, a basic radar emitter model is built up using laboratory instruments by considering basic radar emitter models. Technical specs of these instruments have to be known well to find out how many emitters can be emulated simultaneously and what the limits of these emulations are. After giving emulation results, trigging signal generator externally to obtain complex mixed pulse sequences is mentioned. In the following section related schematics are given about implementing radar emitters. Cost efficient way of emitter emulation is mentioned by using wideband RF synthesizer/VCO with integrated RF mixers and some microwave components in the following section. A board is designed including all required components to implement radar emitter emulation. Tests are implemented in laboratory environment. Finally test results and technical specifications of the design are given. Also cost calculations of the implemented designs are done in the final section and some examples related to the use of emulators in environmental scenarios are given. Future work is also explained again in this final section.

Changes to the signal environment of a radar warning receiver (RWR) over time through dataset drift can negatively affect a machine learning (ML) model, deployed for radar emitter classification (REC). The training data comes from a simulator at Saab AB, in the form of pulsed radar in a time-series. In order to investigate this phenomenon on a neural network (NN), this study first implements an underlying classifier (UC) in the form of a deep ensemble (DE), where each ensemble member consists of an NN with two independently trained bidirectional LSTM channels for each of the signal features pulse repetition interval (PRI), pulse width (PW) and carrier frequency (CF). From tests, the UC performs best for REC when using all three features. Because dataset drift can be treated as detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) samples over time, the aim is to reduce NN overconfidence on data from unseen radar emitters in order to enable OOD detection. The method estimates uncertainty with predictive entropy and classifies samples reaching an entropy larger than a threshold as OOD. In the first set of tests, OOD is defined from holding out one feature modulation from the training dataset, and choosing this as the only modulation in the OOD dataset used during testing. With this definition, Stagger and Jitter are most difficult to detect as OOD. Moreover, using DEs with 6 ensemble members and implementing LogitNorm to the architecture improves the OOD detection performance. Furthermore, the OOD detection method performs well for up to 300 emitter classes and predictive entropy outperforms the baseline for almost all tests. Finally, the model performs worse when OOD is simply defined as signals from unseen emitters, because of a precision decrease. In conclusion, the implemented changes managed to reduce the overconfidence for this particular NN, and improve OOD detection for REC.

En Guerre Electronique, l’identification des signaux radar est un atout majeur de la prise de décisions tactiques liées au théâtre d’opérations militaires. En fournissant des informations sur la présence de menaces, la classification et le partitionnement des signaux radar ont alors un rôle crucial assurant un choix adapté des contre-mesures dédiées à ces menaces et permettant la détection de signaux radar inconnus pour la mise à jour des bases de données. Les systèmes de Mesures de Soutien Electronique enregistrent la plupart du temps des mélanges de signaux radar provenant de différents émetteurs présents dans l’environnement électromagnétique. Le signal radar, décrit par un motif de modulations impulsionnelles, est alors souvent partiellement observé du fait de mesures manquantes et aberrantes. Le processus d’identification se fonde sur l’analyse statistique des paramètres mesurables du signal radar qui le caractérisent tant quantitativement que qualitativement. De nombreuses approches mêlant des techniques de fusion de données et d’apprentissage statistique ont été développées. Cependant, ces algorithmes ne peuvent pas gérer les données manquantes et des méthodes de substitution de données sont requises afin d’utiliser ces derniers. L’objectif principal de cette thèse est alors de définir un modèle de classification et partitionnement intégrant la gestion des valeurs aberrantes et manquantes présentes dans tout type de données. Une approche fondée sur les modèles de mélange de lois de probabilités est proposée dans cette thèse. Les modèles de mélange fournissent un formalisme mathématique flexible favorisant l’introduction de variables latentes permettant la gestion des données aberrantes et la modélisation des données manquantes dans les problèmes de classification et de partionnement. L’apprentissage du modèle ainsi que la classification et le partitionnement sont réalisés dans un cadre d’inférence bayésienne où une méthode d’approximation variationnelle est introduite afin d’estimer la loi jointe a posteriori des variables latentes et des paramètres. Des expériences sur diverses données montrent que la méthode proposée fournit de meilleurs résultats que les algorithmes standards. / In Electronic Warfare, radar signals identification is a supreme asset for decision making in military tactical situations. By providing information about the presence of threats, classification and clustering of radar signals have a significant role ensuring that countermeasures against enemies are well-chosen and enabling detection of unknown radar signals to update databases. Most of the time, Electronic Support Measures systems receive mixtures of signals from different radar emitters in the electromagnetic environment. Hence a radar signal, described by a pulse-to-pulse modulation pattern, is often partially observed due to missing measurements and measurement errors. The identification process relies on statistical analysis of basic measurable parameters of a radar signal which constitute both quantitative and qualitative data. Many general and practical approaches based on data fusion and machine learning have been developed and traditionally proceed to feature extraction, dimensionality reduction and classification or clustering. However, these algorithms cannot handle missing data and imputation methods are required to generate data to use them. Hence, the main objective of this work is to define a classification/clustering framework that handles both outliers and missing values for any types of data. Here, an approach based on mixture models is developed since mixture models provide a mathematically based, flexible and meaningful framework for the wide variety of classification and clustering requirements. The proposed approach focuses on the introduction of latent variables that give us the possibility to handle sensitivity of the model to outliers and to allow a less restrictive modelling of missing data. A Bayesian treatment is adopted for model learning, supervised classification and clustering and inference is processed through a variational Bayesian approximation since the joint posterior distribution of latent variables and parameters is untractable. Some numerical experiments on synthetic and real data show that the proposed method provides more accurate results than standard algorithms.