STF-GCN: A Multi-Domain Graph Convolution Network Method for Automatic Modulation Recognition via Adaptive Correlation

Automatic Modulation Recognition (AMR) is an essential part of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) dynamic spectrum allocation. However, current deep learning-based AMR (DL-AMR) methods are challenged to extract discriminative and robust features at low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), where the representation of modulation symbols is highly interfered by noise. Furthermore, current research on GNN methods for AMR tasks generally suffers from issues related to graph structure construction and computational complexity. In this paper, we propose a Spatial-Temporal-Frequency Graph Convolution Network (STF-GCN) framework, with the temporal domain as the anchor point, to fuse spatial and frequency domain features embedded in the graph structure nodes. On this basis, an adaptive correlation-based adjacency matrix construction method is proposed, which significantly enhances the graph structure’s capacity to aggregate local information into individual nodes. In addition, a PoolGAT layer is proposed to coarsen and compress the global key features of the graph, significantly reducing the computational complexity. The results of the experiments confirm that STF-GCN is able to achieve recognition performance far beyond the state-of-the-art DL-AMR algorithms, with overall accuracies of 64.35%, 66.04% and 70.95% on the RML2016.10a, RML2016.10b and RML22 datasets, respectively. Furthermore, the average recognition accuracies under low SNR conditions from -14dB to 0dB outperform the state-of-the-art (SOTA) models by 1.20%, 1.95% and 1.83%, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/WestdoorSad/STF-GCN.