Maximum Likelihood and IRLS Based Moving Source Localization with Distributed Sensors

Xudong Zhang, Fangzhou Wang, Hongbin Li, Braham Himed

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

14 Scopus citations

Abstract

In this article, we consider the problem of estimating the location and velocity of a moving source using a distributed passive radar sensor network. We first derive the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) using direct sensor observations, when the source signal is unknown and modeled as a deterministic process. Since the MLE obtains the source location and velocity estimates through a search process over the parameter space and is quite computationally intensive, we also developed an efficient algorithm to solve the problem using a two-step approach. The first step finds the time difference of arrival (TDOA) and frequency difference of arrival (FDOA) estimates for each sensor with respect to a reference sensor by using a two-dimensional fast Fourier transform and interpolation, while the second step employs an iterative reweighted least square (IRLS) approach with a varying weighting matrix to determine the source location and velocity. To benchmark the performance of the proposed methods, a constrained Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) for the considered source localization problem is derived. Numerical results show that the IRLS approach has a lower signal-to-noise ratio threshold phenomenon compared with several recent TDOA/FDOA-based methods, especially when the source is considerably farther away from some sensors than others, creating a larger disparity in the quality of sensors observations.

Original languageEnglish
Article number9188024
Pages (from-to)448-461
Number of pages14
JournalIEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems
Volume57
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 2021

Keywords

  • Constrained Cramér-Rao bound (CRB)
  • IRLS
  • distributed sensors
  • frequency difference of arrival (FDOA)
  • linear weighted least squares (LWLS)
  • maximum likelihood estimator (MLE)
  • moving source localization
  • time difference of arrival (TDOA)

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