Computationally efficient TDOA, FDOA and differential Doppler rate estimation algorithm for passive emitter localization

Abstract

This paper addresses the joint time difference of arrival (TDOA), frequency difference of arrival (FDOA) and differential Doppler rate estimation problem in passive emitter localization, considering the range and Doppler frequency migrations during the observation time. A computationally efficient estimation algorithm via second-order keystone transform and Lv's distribution is proposed. This method can effectively remove two types of migrations and accomplish the parameter estimation. Cross-terms suppression ability of the proposed method is also analyzed and its characteristic indicates the applicability in the scenario of multi-targets. The whole estimation step can be fast implemented by complex multiplications, fast Fourier transform (FFT) and inverse FFT operations without any searching procedure. Extensive numerical experiments validate that with a much lower computational cost, the proposed method could achieve comparable estimation performance with the maximum likelihood estimator and outperforms the other representative algorithms.