A modular neural network for direction-of-arrival estimation of two sources

This work addresses the problem of estimating the direction-of-arrival (DOA) of two sources using an array of sensors. This problem is mostly useful in radar applications, where we have few targets at each range bin. Super-resolution algorithms, such as maximum likelihood (ML) estimation and multiple signal classification (MUSIC), have been applied to this problem, but the former involves high computation efforts, while the later has poor estimation performance for coherent sources. In this work, we propose a DOA estimation network, named RBF-AML, which combines the approximated ML (AML) estimator and a radial basis function (RBF) neural network (NN). In the proposed RBF-AML network, the entire two dimensional DOA space is divided into multiple sectors covered by RBF experts. The AML function is then used as a mediator among the experts and selects the most suitable one as the final output of the system. The performance of the RBF-AML network for a two coherent sources case in a Y shape array configuration is evaluated. We show that the performance of the RBF-AML network is similar to the performance of the classical AML DOA estimation for various signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), phase of the correlation coefficient and signal-to-interference ratios (SIRs). Furthermore, the RBF-AML network requires fewer computational efforts than the classical AML DOA estimation and therefore is an attractive choice for real-time applications.