A Hypothesis-Testing Analysis of Blind Recognition for Polar Codes

Computer Science > Information Theory [Submitted on 16 Jun 2026] Title:A Hypothesis-Testing Analysis of Blind Recognition for Polar Codes View PDF HTML (experimental)Abstract:Blind recognition of polar-coded transmissions is an important task in non-cooperative wireless forensics and security-oriented signal analysis. When the code length is known or has been estimated, recovering the frozen/information bit-position pattern is a key step in identifying the underlying polar-code structure and enabling subsequent information recovery from intercepted observations. In this paper, blind recognition of polar codes is investigated from a hypothesis-testing perspective under the successive cancellation (SC)-based synthetic bit-channel representation. First, under an ideal SC-consistent condition, we formulate position-wise recognition as a binary hypothesis test between frozen-position and information-position models, which provides a theoretical benchmark for analyzing their intrinsic distinguishability. Second, we show that the adopted soft recognition metric admits an exact shifted log-likelihood-ratio interpretation. This justifies ln 2 as the neutral threshold under equal priors and costs, while unequal priors or costs lead to the corresponding Bayesian threshold shift. Third, under the ideal SC-consistent model and this neutral setting, we derive upper and lower bounds on the position-wise and sequence-level recognition error probabilities with multiple independent observations. The resulting overlap coefficient is further related to the classical Bhattacharyya parameter, establishing an interpretable link between blind-recognition difficulty and polar synthetic-channel reliability. Simulation results show that the derived bounds characterize the recognition performance under the ideal SC-consistent model and capture the effects of code length, the number of intercepted observations, and SNR. Further paired comparisons in the tested settings indicate that the SC-consistent recursion provides a good sequence-level match to the realistic SC-recursive procedure. Current browse context: cs.IT References & Citations Loading... Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Recommenders and Search Tools Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.