One Size Does Not Fit All: Multi-scale, Cascaded RNNs for Radar Classification

Abstract

Edge sensing with micro-power pulse-Doppler radars is an emergent domain in monitoring and surveillance with several smart city applications. Existing solutions for the clutter versus multi-source radar classification task are limited in terms of either accuracy or efficiency, and in some cases, struggle with a tradeoff between false alarms and recall of sources. We find that this problem can be resolved by learning the classifier across multiple time-scales. We propose a multi-scale, cascaded recurrent neural network architecture, MSC-RNN, composed of an efficient multi-instance learning (MIL) Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) for clutter discrimination at a lower tier and a more complex RNN classifier for source classification at the upper tier. By controlling the invocation of the upper RNN with the help of the lower tier conditionally, MSC-RNN achieves an overall accuracy of 0.972. Our approach holistically improves the accuracy and per-class recalls over machine learning models suitable for radar inferencing. Notably, we outperform cross-domain handcrafted feature engineering with purely time-domain deep feature learning, while also being up to ∼3× more efficient than a competitive solution.