Investigation of electromagnetic pulse scattering for metallic object classification using machine learning

This paper presents a metallic object classification method using various electromagnetic pulses. Each electromagnetic pulse irradiated eight metallic objects placed at increasing distances from 10 mm to 40 mm relative to the electromagnetic sensing system. The electromagnetic sensing system consisted of two RL circuits placed in close proximity. Objects were classified using linear (perceptron and multiclass logistic regression) and non-linear (neural network, 1D convolutional neural network (CNN) and 2D CNN) machine learning classifiers. The machine learning classifiers were trained on experimental data collected in an electromagnetically shielded laboratory. A 10-fold cross-validation mean classification accuracy of 99.4 ± 0.3% for the 1D CNN classifier, and 92.9 ± 1.2% for the 2D CNN classifier, was achieved using a rectangular chirp electromagnetic pulse. The rectangular chirp pulse outperformed two-sided decaying exponential, Gaussian, triangular, raised cosine, and rectangular pulses. All pulses had equal energy. While the rectangular chirp performed best overall, other pulses more accurately distinguished between some objects.