Ionogram Echo Extraction Based on the Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract

Free electrons and ions in the ionosphere can change the propagation speed and direction of radio waves, which greatly affects the performance of wireless communication, navigation, radar positioning, and so on (Ravan et al., 2012;Zhou et al., 2011). The effective extraction of ionospheric echoes is beneficial to the research of ionospheric characteristics, for example, the physical process, the characteristics of the ionospheric state, and the law of ionospheric radio wave propagation. In addition, it supports the study of radio transmission theory and provides a theoretical basis for the design, use and detection of the radio engineering system.Recently, some studies on the extraction of ionospheric echoes mainly focus on three types of ionograms, which are obtained by vertical, oblique and backscatter sounding (