Spaceborne Algorithm for Recognizing Lightning Whistler Recorded by an Electric Field Detector Onboard the CSES Satellite

Abstract

The electric field detector of the CSES satellite has captured a vast number of lightning whistler events. To recognize them effectively from the massive amount of electric field detector data, a recognition algorithm based on speech technology has attracted attention. However, this approach has failed to recognize the lightning whistler events which are contaminated by other low-frequency electromagnetic disturbances. To overcome this limitation, we apply the single-channel blind source separation method and audio recognition approach to develop a novel model, which consists of two stages. (1) The training stage: Firstly, we preprocess the electric field detector wave data into the audio fragment. Then, for each audio fragment, mel-frequency cepstral coefficients are extracted and input into the long short-term memory network for training the novel lightning whistler recognition model. (2) The inference stage: Firstly, we process each audio fragment with the single-channel blind source to generate two different sub-signals. Then, for each sub-signal, the mel-frequency cepstral coefficient features are extracted and input into the lightning whistler recognition model to recognize the lightning whistler. Finally, the two results above are processed by decision fusion to obtain the final recognition result. Experimental results based on the electric field detector data of the CSES satellite demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm. Compared with classical methods, the accuracy, recall, and F1-score of this algorithm can be increased by 17%, 62.2%, and 50%, respectively. However, the time cost only increases by 0.41 s.

Keywords

• single channel blind source separation
• lightning whistlers
• electric field detector
• CSES satellite