Passive Geolocation of Multiple Pulsed Emitters

This paper proposes a new method for geolocating an unknown number of uncooperative transmitters sending pulsed waveforms. The geolocation algorithm is a modified version of the multidimensional assignment (MDA) algorithm for time difference of arrival (TDOA) measurements. The key problem that this algorithm addresses is data association: matching time of arrival (TOA) measurements with a potential target. Prior work showed that the MDA algorithm can solve this problem, but only with artificial TOA measurements. In this paper, we use an edge detector to estimate the TOAs and address the detector effects on both TOA accuracy and data association. The MDA algorithm is used to associate the TOA data and provide geolocation estimates from the corresponding TDOA data. To take advantage of the pulsed waveform, a tracking method is applied to multiple pulses in the transmit frame to make geolocation more robust. The Cramér-Rao Lower Bound is calculated and compared to the simulated geolocation results.