Study on the effectiveness of a Weighted Pseudo Linear approach to emitter localization

Abstract

The problem of emitter localization is studied using a Weighted Pseudo-Linear Estimation (WPLE) approach. In certain localization applications, each angle-of-arrival (AOA) measurement also contains side information indicative of the quality of each measurement. Furthermore, a two-stage location approach allows the weighting scheme to also incorporate the emitter range. In this paper we apply and simulate the performance of a two-step approach for applying a Weighted Pseudo-Linear Estimation (WPLE) method toward the location of a fixed emitter for a specific geometric case. The weighting scheme allows the inclusion of both measurement quality and emitter range. A simulation study shows the unweighted estimates to be 4.8 to 6 times larger than the estimates produced by this two-stage WPLE process. Furthermore, the need for outlier mitigation is illustrated by simulation results where the presence of outliers significantly reduces the emitter location accuracy.