Combined RF-Based Drone Detection and Classification

Despite several beneficial applications, unfortunately, drones are also being used for illicit activities such as drug trafficking, firearm smuggling or to impose threats to security-sensitive places like airports and nuclear power plants. The existing drone localization and neutralization technologies work on the assumption that the drone has already been detected and classified. Although we have observed a tremendous advancement in the sensor industry in this decade, there is no robust drone detection and classification method proposed in the literature yet. This paper focuses on radio frequency (RF) based drone detection and classification using the frequency signature of the transmitted signal. We have created a novel drone RF dataset using commercial drones and presented a detailed comparison between a two-stage and combined detection and classification framework. The detection and classification performance of both frameworks are presented for a single-signal and simultaneous multi-signal scenario. With detailed analysis, we show that You Only Look Once (YOLO) framework provides better detection performance compared to the Goodness-of-Fit (GoF) spectrum sensing for a simultaneous multi-signal scenario and good classification performance comparable to Deep Residual Neural Network (DRNN) framework.