A Low Computation Direct Position Determination Based on TDOA

Aiming at the unknown signal waveform case in passive location, we propose a new direct position determination (DPD) method based on time difference of arrival (TDOA) in this paper. After analyzing the signal, we represent the signal by a finite number of unknown parameters. Then we decompose and recombine these parameters in order to propose a virtual parameter matrix, by which we construct a concise cost function based on maximum likelihood estimation. The unknown parameters that do not contain the location information of the emitter can be eliminated by using the virtual matrix when solving the cost function. Simulation results show that the localization performance of this method is obviously better than the two-step method, and the amount of calculation is much lower than the traditional DPD method based on TDOA.