This paper investigates the use of local receptive field networks (LRFN) in detecting sensor failures of a control system in the presence of model-plant mismatch. Simulation results indicate that LRFNs hold significant promise in sensor failure detection. Another issue discussed in this paper is a method to prune redundant nodes. A simple scheme which uses singular value decomposition (SVD) is developed to identify and remove excess nodes. Comparable classification performance is obtained using reduced and standard LRFN.