Development of an Open-Source Tool for Consistent Comparisons of Geolocation Algorithms

Source location, such as with angle-of-arrival triangulation time difference of arrival, or frequency difference of arrival, can be formulated in a sensor-agnostic manner, using generic expressions like the measurement function (a non-linear mapping of sensor and source coordinates to measurements), the likelihood function, the Jacobian function (gradient of the likelihood function with respect to changes it source location), and the Fisher Information Matrix. Using these generic terms, we have released an open-source MATLAB toolkit that allows for convenient comparison of performance across modalities, source location algorithms, and heterogeneous sensor networks. This paper discusses the use of the toolkit for some novel system design trades, and introduce the necessary interfaces that must be implemented to extend the toolkit with new source location algorithms or novel sensor modalities.