Robust estimation of the number of coherent radar signal sources using deep learning

Abstract

Abstract A deep‐learning‐based approach to estimating the number of coherent sources in radar is presented. A proper estimate of the number of sources in a signal enables improved angle‐of‐arrival (AoA) estimation common in applications such as radar, sonar, and communication systems. Many AoA estimators utilised in these areas require accurate estimates of the number of sources for enhanced performance. Herein, a robust method that performs well under the existence of coherent sources is developed. The proposed method is based on deep learning and it is shown to perform better than state‐of‐the‐art versions of the Akaike Information Criteria (AIC), Minimum Description Length (MDL), and Exponentially Embedded Families (EEF) estimators, which employ spatial smoothing of the covariance matrix to handle coherent signals.

Keywords

• covariance matrices
• direction‐of‐arrival estimation
• estimation theory
• radar computing
• radar signal processing
• smoothing methods