An Efficient Direct Position Determination Method for Multiple Strictly Noncircular Sources

This paper focuses on the localization methods for multiple sources received by widely separated arrays. The conventional two-step methods extract measurement parameters and then estimate the positions from them. In the contrast to the conventional two-step methods, direct position determination (DPD) localizes transmitters directly from original sensor outputs without estimating intermediate parameters, resulting in higher location accuracy and avoiding the data association. Existing subspace data fusion (SDF)-based DPD developed in the frequency domain is computationally attractive in the presence of multiple transmitters, whereas it does not use special properties of signals. This paper proposes an improved SDF-based DPD algorithm for strictly noncircular sources. We first derive the property of strictly noncircular signals in the frequency domain. On this basis, the observed frequency-domain vectors at all arrays are concatenated and extended by exploiting the noncircular property, producing extended noise subspaces. Fusing the extended noise subspaces of all frequency components and then performing a unitary transformation, we obtain a cost function for each source location, which is formulated as the smallest eigenvalue of a real-valued matrix. To avoid the exhaustive grid search and solve this nonlinear function efficiently, we devise a Newton-type iterative method using matrix Eigen-perturbation theory. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed DPD using Newton-type iteration substantially reduces the running time, and its performance is superior to other localization methods for both near-field and far-field noncircular sources.