DOI: 10.3390/e28080922 ISSN: 1099-4300

Adaptive Flight Maneuver Boundary Localization via Spectral Entropy-Weighted Multi-Channel Spectrogram Fusion

Shansong Song, Wei Han, Bing Wan, Xiangyi Liu, Xichao Su, Chao Li, Yunyang Cao

To address ambiguous maneuver boundaries, background interference, and uneven multi-sensor quality in long-duration flight parameter recordings, this paper proposes an adaptive flight maneuver boundary localization algorithm that integrates spectral entropy-weighted multi-channel spectrogram fusion with attitude-constrained structural correction. Multi-channel Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) spectrograms are first constructed from flight parameter time series. Spectral entropy (SE) is introduced to quantify the uncertainty of each channel’s time–frequency energy distribution and is combined with the maneuver activation ratio (MAR) and the linear contrast ratio (LCR) to form objective credibility weights, thereby suppressing channels dominated by aerodynamic turbulence and high frequency structural vibration. Normal overload soft gating and logarithmic noise floor subtraction are then applied to obtain an enhanced fused spectrogram, from which candidate intervals are extracted by low band energy thresholding. Finally, roll and pitch angle steady-state priors refine the event structure through local boundary refinement, cross-segment expansion/chain merging, and semantic post-processing, recovering continuous maneuvers fragmented by instantaneous energy valleys. On the held-out test sorties (SE_018–SE_020; 61 annotated intervals), the proposed algorithm achieves Precision, Recall, and F1-scores of 0.967. On the full primary corpus of 20 sorties (461 intervals), used for ablation and sensitivity analyses, the corresponding figures are Precision 0.934, Recall 0.959, and F1 0.946, with start and end boundary mean absolute errors of 1.484 s and 1.471 s. Under the same IoU protocol, consistent superiority is observed against learning-based baselines, and an independent external set of 10 sorties yields F1 = 0.938. The results indicate that entropy-constrained multi-sensor time–frequency fusion mainly improves maneuver/background separability, whereas attitude-constrained structural correction restores the integrity of long continuous maneuvers.

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