SAS-SEINet: A SNR-Aware Adaptive Scalable SEI Neural Network Accelerator Using Algorithm–Hardware Co-Design for High-Accuracy and Power-Efficient UAV Surveillance †

As a potential air control measure, RF-based surveillance is one of the most commonly used unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) surveillance methods that exploits specific emitter identification (SEI) technology to identify captured RF signal from ground controllers to UAVs. Recently many SEI algorithms based on deep convolution neural network (DCNN) have emerged. However, there is a lack of the implementation of specific hardware. This paper proposes a high-accuracy and power-efficient hardware accelerator using an algorithm–hardware co-design for UAV surveillance. For the algorithm, we propose a scalable SEI neural network with SNR-aware adaptive precision computation. With SNR awareness and precision reconfiguration, it can adaptively switch between DCNN and binary DCNN to cope with low SNR and high SNR tasks, respectively. In addition, a short-time Fourier transform (STFT) reusing DCNN method is proposed to pre-extract feature of UAV signal. For hardware, we designed a SNR sensing engine, denoising engine, and specialized DCNN engine with hybrid-precision convolution and memory access, aiming at SEI acceleration. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of our design on a FPGA, using a public UAV dataset. Compared with a state-of-the-art algorithm, our method can achieve the highest accuracy of 99.3% and an F1 score of 99.3%. Compared with other hardware designs, our accelerator can achieve the highest power efficiency of 40.12 Gops/W and 96.52 Gops/W with INT16 precision and binary precision.