High Resolution Direct Position Determination of Radio Frequency Sources

The most common methods for localization of radio frequency transmitters are based on two processing steps. In the first step, parameters such as angle of arrival or time of arrival are estimated at each base station independently. In the second step, the estimated parameters are used to determine the location of the transmitters. The direct position determination approach advocates using the observations from all the base stations together in order to estimate the locations in a single step. This single-step method is known to outperform two-step methods when the signal-to-noise ratio is low. In this paper, we propose a direct-position-determination-based method for localization of multiple emitters that transmit unknown signals. The method does not require knowledge of the number of emitters. It is based on minimum-variance-distortionless-response considerations to achieve a high resolution estimator that requires only a two-dimensional search for planar geometry, and a three-dimensional search for the general case.