Direct positioning of multiple targets based on electromagnetic vector sensors array

Electromagnetic vector sensors (EMVSs) have gained significant attention in recent years, particularly in the field of source localization. These multi-component sensors are capable of simultaneously detecting both electric and magnetic field vector information, making them a key area of research and development. Traditional source localization methods usually estimate the source position by estimating intermediate parameters such as direction of arrival (DOA) or time of arrival (TOA) first, which involves multiple processing steps and is highly susceptible to noise. This paper employs EMVS for direct position determination (DPD), proposing distinct algorithms for line-of-sight (LOS) and multipath scenarios. In the LOS scenario, the inherent multidimensional structure of the data received by the EMVS is utilized to represent the received signal as a third-order tensor. Using the selected dual-component EMVS in this paper, data from multiple stations are concatenated into a large tensor, and the spatial location parameters of the target source are directly extracted through parallel factor (PARAFAC) decomposition. In the NLOS scenario, the data received at each station are first decorrelated, followed by direct extraction of the target source’s spatial location parameters using PARAFAC decomposition. The proposed methods eliminate the need for explicit estimation of intermediate parameters, perform localization directly in the tensor domain, and exhibit strong robustness and high capability in resolving multiple sources.