A comprehensive review on airborne multifunction radar working mode recognition

Airborne Multifunction Radar (MFR) working mode recognition is a critical component of electronic reconnaissance. It enables the inference of radar tactical intent, providing a fundamental basis for battlefield situational awareness. Modern radars are advancing toward digitalization and intelligence. Their transmitted waveforms exhibit agile scheduling and high parametric overlap. This leads to a significant degradation of traditional recognition methods in complex electromagnetic environments. To address these challenges, this review provides the mainstream technical paradigms and recent research trajectories of airborne fire-control radars. The study deconstructs three primary technical paradigms, including syntactic modeling, hierarchical inference, and end-to-end recognition. It examines their signal representation mechanisms and analyzes the synergistic integration of feature extraction with underlying identification logics. Furthermore, critical frontier issues are identified, including data-efficient working mode recognition, data-deficient working mode recognition, unseen working mode detection and recognition, and unknown working mode recognition. Finally, current technical limitations are summarized, and potential directions are outlined to support subsequent investigations in this field.