Reliable Near-Field Source Enumeration and Positioning Informed by Two-Stage MUSIC

Jiaying Li, Haifeng Wen, Changsheng You, Yuanwei Liu, Hong Xing

Accurate and reliable near-field multi-source localization is essential for location-aware processing in future wireless systems. However, coherent multipath propagation complicates the direct recovery of line-of-sight (LoS) source positions, while existing estimation methods generally lack explicit control of the risk of source underestimation and positioning uncertainty. In this paper, we investigate reliable source enumeration and positioning in near-field coherent multipath environments. Specifically, we develop a conformal risk control (CRC) based source enumeration scheme that calibrates the penalty coefficient of an eigenvalue-based criterion to control the expected miss-detection ratio at a prescribed level. We further propose MUSIC-Net, a model-based deep learning framework informed by two-stage MUltiple SIgnal Classification (MUSIC), which learns the LoS-related subspace and surrogate distances through subspace-distance-based training, thereby enabling direct source positioning without estimating non-line-of-sight (NLoS) path parameters or performing subsequent path association. To quantify the uncertainty of the estimated positions, we develop a split conformal…