RF-UAVNet: High-Performance Convolutional Network for RF-Based Drone Surveillance Systems

In recent years, the increasing popularity of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has arisen from the emergence of cutting-edge technologies deployed in small and low-cost devices. With the great capability of friendly uses and wide applications for multiple purposes, amateur drones can be piloted to effortlessly access any geographical area. This poses some difficulties in monitoring and managing drones that may invade private or limited-access areas. In this paper, we propose a radio-frequency (RF)-based surveillance solution to effectively detect and classify drones, and recognize operations by leveraging a high-performance convolutional neural network. The proposed network, namely RF-UAVNet, is specified with grouped one-dimensional convolution to significantly reduce the network size and computational cost. Besides, a novel structure of multi-level skip-connection, for the preservation of gradient flow, incorporating multi-level pooling, for the collection of informative deep features, is proposed to achieve high accuracy via learning efficiency improvement. In the experiments, RF-UAVNet yields the accuracy of 99.85% for drone detection, 98.53% for drone classification, and 95.33% for operation mode recognition, numbers which outperform the current state-of-the-art deep learning-based methods on DroneRF, a publicly available dataset for RF-based drone surveillance systems.