Mixed Near-Field and Far-Field Source Localization Based On Convolution Neural Networks via Symmetric Nested Array

In this paper, the convolution neural networks (CNN) are developed for the classification and localization of mixed near-field and far-field sources by using the geometry of symmetric nested array. We first transform the received data into frequency domain. Then, we preprocess the phase difference matrix to decouple mixed sources. Considering that the counter-diagonal elements in the phase difference matrix only contain the direction of arrival (DOA) parameter of each mixed source, we utilize the upper right elements as the input of CNN to estimate the DOA of each mixed source. In order to avoid the influence of noise, we construct a particular range vector without the estimated DOA and employ the output of autoencoder to classify the mixed sources. Finally, we further exploit the output of autoencoder and apply the CNN without bias vectors to estimate the range of near-field sources. In contrast to the traditional learning-based approaches regarding the parameter estimation as a classification problem, the proposed approach considers the parameter estimation as a regression problem and can significantly reduce the complexity of networks. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed learning-based method can improve the precision for the mixed source localization. Moreover, the proposed method is robust to the off-grid parameters and the different numbers of mixed sources.