Yongqiang Lu’s research while affiliated with State Key Laboratory of Medical Genetics of China and other places

In complex electromagnetic environments, satellite telemetry, tracking, and command (TT&C) signals often become submerged in background noise. Traditional TT&C signal detection algorithms suffer a significant performance degradation or can even be difficult to execute when phase information is absent. Currently, deep-learning-based detection algorithms often rely on expert-experience-driven post-processing steps, failing to achieve end-to-end signal detection. To address the aforementioned limitations of existing algorithms, we propose an intelligent satellite TT&C signal detection method based on triplet attention and Transformer (TATR). TATR introduces the residual triplet attention (ResTA) backbone network, which effectively combines spectral feature channels, frequency, and amplitude dimensions almost without introducing additional parameters. In signal detection, TATR employs a multi-head self-attention mechanism to effectively address the long-range dependency issue in spectral information. Moreover, the prediction-box-matching module based on the Hungarian algorithm eliminates the need for non-maximum suppression (NMS) post-processing steps, transforming the signal detection problem into a set prediction problem and enabling parallel output of the detection results. TATR combines the global attention capability of ResTA with the local self-attention capability of Transformer. Experimental results demonstrate that utilizing only the signal spectrum amplitude information, TATR achieves accurate detection of weak TT&C signals with signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) of −15 dB and above (mAP@0.5 > 90%), with parameter estimation errors below 3%, which outperforms typical target detection methods.