High-Order Convolutional Attention Networks for Automatic Modulation Classification in Communication

Automatic modulation classification is a challenging and critical task in the field of communication. Deep convolutional networks (ConvNets) have been recently applied in cognitive radio and achieved remarkable performance. However, existing ConvNet-based methods mainly focus on the first-order architecture design, while fail to explore feature correlations of radio signal, which are particularly significant for useful information extraction in low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). In this paper, we propose high-order convolutional attention networks (HoCANs) for radio signal expression and feature correlation learning, based on a novel high-order attention mechanism to rescale the convolutional features along channel and sequence dimensions. High-order convolutional layer and covariance matrix after nonlinear transformation are led for tenser filtering with more discriminative representations of radio signals. Experiments have been conducted to validate the superiority of HoCANs which achieve state-of-the-art accuracy for automatic modulation classification on RADIOML 2018.01A dataset.