The detection of communication signals in heterogeneous electromagnetic environments currently relies primarily on a one-dimensional statistical feature threshold method. However, this approach is highly sensitive to dynamic changes in the environment, fluctuations in signal-to-noise ratios, and complex noise. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel time-frequency diagram based on high-order accumulation for signal detection. Traditional time-frequency diagrams suffer from poor noise suppression ability and unclear features. However, higher-order cumulants can effectively overcome these shortcomings. Currently, methods based on higher-order cumulants are typically limited to one-dimensional signals. Yet, two-dimensional time-frequency signal diagrams can represent a broader array of features. This paper employs higher-order accumulation to extract time-frequency features from the received signal, thereby transforming the conventional radio detection problem into an image recognition challenge. By merging the advantages of higher-order accumulations and time-frequency diagrams, we propose the use of higher-order accumulation time-frequency diagrams for signal detection. Extensive experimental simulations demonstrate that the proposed time-frequency diagram exhibits strong anti-noise performance and effectively suppresses frequency bias from multiple perspectives. The performance of the Higher-Order Cumulant-Time Frequency (HOC-TF) indicated lower Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) compared with the Short-Time Fourier Transform-Time Frequency (STFT-TF) and Wavelet Transform-Time Frequency (WT-TF). Additionally, compared to the STFT-TF and WT-TF methodologies, the novel time-frequency diagram introduced demonstrates superior stability using the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) method. Moreover, by combining the new time-frequency diagram with the deep learning YOLOV5 network, signal detection and modulation identification of communication signals can be achieved.
