Direct localization of emitters based on expectation-maximization technique

In this paper, a novel method for the direct localization of emitters is proposed. To avoid synchronisation, we consider the angle-of-arrival based localization system in this work. We derive the maximum likelihood estimator for the noncoherent processing model, and solve the optimization by applying the expectation-maximization (EM) technique. Unlike the conventional 2-step processing, the proposed method retains the geometry constraint of the incident signal, and can achieve better localization performance. Besides, the novel method does not require the pairing of measurements, by taking advantages of the decoupling structure of EM. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.