In one embodiment, a method for specific emitter identification includes receiving a signal from an emitter indicative of a hardware characteristic of the emitter. A computer-readable representation of the received signal is generated. A plurality of gradients for each partition of a plurality of partitions of the computer-readable representation is computed. Each gradient is indicative of at least the angular orientation of a respective portion of the computer-readable representation. A histogram is computed for each partition by assigning each computed gradient to a bin based at least in part on the magnitude of the computed gradient. One or more Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) features are extracted from a concatenation of the bins of all of the computed histograms. The one or more HOG features are compared to one or more corresponding HOG features stored on a computer-readable medium. Based at least in part on the comparison, a determination is made regarding whether the emitter has a particular identification.