Comparative Evaluation of MLP, 1D-CNN and LSTM for Waveform Classification in Additive White Gaussian Noise

Accurate waveform classification in noisy environments is an important task in modern communications, radar signal analysis, biomedical signal interpretation, industrial monitoring and other signal processing systems. This paper investigates the performance of three neural network architectures: Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), one-dimensional Convolutional Neural Network (1D-CNN), and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) for multiclass waveform classification in the presence of Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN). A time series dataset consisting of multiple waveform classes is generated and corrupted with AWGN across a wide range of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) levels to simulate noisy signal distortion conditions. The three models are trained and evaluated under identical conditions to ensure a fair comparison. Their classification performance is evaluated in terms of accuracy, Confusion Matrix (CM), Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve and the Area Under the ROC curve (AUC) across varying SNR values. Simulation results demonstrate that the 1D-CNN effectively captures local temporal patterns and achieves superior robustness in classification at moderate and high SNR levels. The LSTM model demonstrates the ability to capture temporal dependencies in sequential waveform data but exhibits sensitivity to waveform variations due to amplitude, phase and frequency changes and noise at lower SNR values. The MLP, although computationally simpler, shows comparatively limited performance in low-SNR conditions due to its lack of temporal feature extraction capability. For the case of multiclass deterministic waveforms, the accuracy of classification for the 1D-CNN and LSTM is nearly 100% at SNR = 5 dB showing their robustness in classification, whereas the accuracy of MLP is approximately 70% that shows poor classification in noisy conditions. When there is random amplitude, frequency and phase variations in the waveforms, the accuracy of the 1D-CNN and MLP increases with SNR, and 1D-CNN superior to MLP. However, the LSTM accuracy fails to improve with SNR, resulting in poor classification performance in such a scenario. The results provide an insight into the suitability of different neural architectures for waveform classification tasks in noisy communication or other time series applications and highlight the advantages of convolutional feature extraction for robust signal recognition.