Optimizing RF-Sensing for Drone Detection: The Synergy of Ensemble Learning and Sensor Fusion

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) find extensive applications across various industries, surveillance, and communication services. However, concerns regarding their potential misuse have prompted the development of counter-drone measures. In this paper, we propose a counter-UAV approach centered on radio frequency (RF) signal sensing. Upon the detection of an RF signal, our system employs a Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT)-based spectrogram (SP) generation process. This SP is further refined through adaptive windowing and logarithmic tuning to extract multi-intensity features. To classify the complex RF time-domain signals and STFT spectrograms, we utilize two deep learning classifiers: RF-Network and SP-Network, facilitating a multi-class classification process by using deep neural networks (DNN). To enhance the overall accuracy of our model, we leverage an ensemble neural network (EN-Net) by combining predictions from the RF-Network and SP-Network classifiers. Fusing data from a single sensor in both time and frequency domains enhances DNN accuracy by providing complementary information, improving robustness, and reducing overfitting, resulting in increased model performance and a deep understanding of the data. Our results demonstrate a notable improvement in accuracy—specifically, a 36% increase for multi-class models when compared to single-class models. This proves the effectiveness of our EN-Net model in addressing security threats posed by UAVs through advanced RF signal analysis and classification.