Source localization using deep neural networks in a shallow water environment.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are advantageous for representing complex nonlinear relationships. This paper applies DNNs to source localization in a shallow water environment. Two methods are proposed to estimate the range and depth of a broadband source through different neural network architectures. The first adopts the classical two-stage scheme, in which feature extraction and DNN analysis are independent steps. The eigenvectors associated with the modal signal space are extracted as the input feature. Then, the time delay neural network is exploited to model the long term feature representation and constructs the regression model. The second concerns a convolutional neural network-feed-forward neural network (CNN-FNN) architecture, which trains the network directly by taking the raw multi-channel waveforms as input. The CNNs are expected to perform spatial filtering for multi-channel signals, in an operation analogous to time domain filters. The outputs of CNNs are summed as the input to FNN. Several experiments are conducted on the simulated and experimental data to evaluate the performance of the proposed methods. The results demonstrate that DNNs are effective for source localization in complex and varied water environments, especially when there is little precise environmental information.