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1. Introduction
Passive radar detects and tracks potential targets by exploiting noncooperative transmitters as their sources of radar transmission [1–4]. Dispensing with the need for a dedicated transmitter makes passive radar inherently low cost and hence attractive for a broad range of applications. Recently, by taking the advantage of the spatial diversity from widely separated antenna configuration, passive radar with multiple separated receivers and noncooperative transmitters, also known as multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) passive radar, has received growing attention due to its enormous potential in improving the detection and localization performances [5–8].
Target localization is one of the salient issues in the MIMO passive radar field. The time difference of arrival (TDOA) measurement, which usually comes from the crosscorrelation (CC) processing between the reference signal and the reflected target echo [9], is a common measurement used to determine the target position. And over the years, many localization methods have been developed based on TDOA measurements [10–14]. However, the TDOA-based localization with terrestrial transmitters and receivers suffers from poor accuracy in estimating the target height [11] and is overly dependent on the TDOA measurement accuracy. To overcome the fundamental flaw of TDOA-based localization, as suggested in [11], angle of arrival (AOA) measurement of the reflected target echo, which can be determined by subspace-based estimators [15], can be jointly utilized [16]. However, unlike TD-based localization which has been extensively studied [10–14], the hybrid TDOA/AOA localization is potentially more challenging due to the higher nonlinearity between the desired target position and TDOA/AOA measurements, and less effort has been devoted to hybrid TDOA/AOA localization.
Recently, borrowing the two-stage weighted least squares (TSWLS) idea originally proposed for radiation source localization [17], A. Noroozi1 et al. [18] developed a TSWLS algebraic solution for target localization with a MIMO passive radar using TDOA and AOA measurements. The performance analysis indicates that it can achieve the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) under mild noise conditions. By using a different way to linearize the TDOA and AOA measurement equations, R. Amiri et al. [19] explored a different algebraic localization algorithm based on weighted least squares (WLS) minimization, which is also shown theoretically and numerically to achieve the CRLB. Unlike Noroozi1’s method which requires two WLS stages, Amiri’s method determines the target position in only one WLS stage. Nevertheless, the above studies are based on the ideal assumption that the transmitter and receiver positions are exactly known, which is certainly not practical. Actually, the transmitter and receiver positions need to be estimated before the localization of an unknown target can be achieved, and the transmitter and receiver positions cannot be precisely known, especially when the antennas are mounted on moving platforms [20–22], GPS signal is sheltered, or the transmitters are extremely noncooperative (like the hostile radar radiation whose position could usually only roughly determined by electronic reconnaissance techniques [23]). The performance degradation created by transmitter and receiver position errors has been known for a while in the TDOA-based localization with MIMO passive radar [24]. And it was shown that the transmitter and receiver position errors can significantly degrade the localization performance of MIMO passive radars. Consequently, the errors in transmitter and receiver positions need to be taken into consideration in practical applications during the design of localization algorithms in MIMO passive radars.
In this paper, we address the target localization problem from TDOA and AOA measurements in the presence of transmitter and receiver position errors. We evaluate how much degradation the target localization accuracy is with respect to the amount of transmitter and receiver position errors by deriving the CRLB in the presence of transmitter and receiver position errors and examining the increase in CRLB due to the transmitter and receiver position errors. Then, a novel closed-form solution is proposed for the localization problem to reduce the performance degradation created by the transmitter and receiver position errors. The proposed solution is shown analytically, under some mild approximations, to reach the CRLB, even in the presence of transmitter and receiver position errors. Some numerical simulations will be conducted to support the theoretical development of the proposed solution.
1.1. Notations
This paper involves numerous symbols. By convention, uppercase and lowercase bold fonts denote matrices and vectors, respectively. The operations
The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the localization scenario and introduces the symbols involved. Section 3 evaluates the CRLB in the presence of transmitter and receiver position errors. Section 4 presents a novel proposed algebraic solution as well as a theoretical accuracy analysis. Section 5 contains the simulation results to verify the localization performance of the proposed solution, and Section 6 is the conclusion.
2. Problem Formulation
Consider a MIMO passive radar like the one illustrated in Figure 1. This MIMO passive radar system is comprised of N geographically separated receivers with positions
[figure omitted; refer to PDF]
In a practical localization scenario, the actual positions of all transmitters and receivers are not known, and the available positions are as follows:
Based on the above geometry, the range between transmitter m and the target is
The true AOA pair for receiver n, that is, the elevation angle denoted by
Considering the unavoidable measurement noises in reality, the erroneous version of the TDOA and AOA measurements can be expressed as
In this work, we are interested in identifying the unknown target position as accurately as possible, using the noisy transmitter/receiver positions and the TDOA/AOA measurements, as well as their error statistical characteristics. Nevertheless, this is a potentially challenging task since the desired target position is highly nonlinear with respect to the TDOA and AOA measurements.
3. CRLB Analysis
CRLB traces out the lowest possible variance of unbiased estimators and is often used as a benchmark for performance evaluation. In this section, we shall characterize the influence of transmitter and receiver position errors on the localization accuracy by deriving a novel CRLB for target position estimation with transmitter/receiver position errors and comparing it with the one without transmitter/receiver position error.
3.1. CRLB with Transmitter and Receiver Position Errors
In addition to TDOA/AOA measurement noises, the presence of transmitter and receiver position errors is included. Therefore, the unknown parameter vector for the CRLB evaluation is
By definition, the CRLB of
Comparing (17) with the CRLB in [18, 19] indicates that
3.2. Performance Degradation from Transmitter and Receiver Position Errors
We shall characterize analytically the performance degradation in the presence of transmitter and receiver position errors by establishing the positive definiteness of the second term in (17), that is,
Since
Next, we proceed to prove
Synthesizing the above results, that is,
4. Algorithm Development and Analysis
The degradation of localization accuracy in the presence of transmitter and receiver position errors has been shown in Section 3 through the derivation and analysis of the CRLB. In what follows, to minimize the influence of transmitter and receiver position errors on target localization accuracy, we will proceed to design a novel algebraic localization algorithm for the aforementioned practical localization scenario. After that, a theoretical analysis will be performed to show that the proposed solution achieves the CRLB when satisfying some mild conditions.
4.1. Localization Algorithm
The proposed solution is derived based on transforming the nonlinear TDOA and AOA equations into linear ones, from which the target position can be estimated using a simple WLS minimization.
To achieve this, we first rearrange the TDOA equation in (5) as
Squaring both sides of (18), and then rearranging it as
Since the nuisance parameter
Putting (20) into (19) yields
Since only the noisy values of
To linearize the AOA equations, rewrite (6) and (7) as
Substitute
Now, collecting (25), (28), and (29) with respect to the M transmitters and N receivers, we can rearrange them in matrix form as
for
Note that (25) is a linear set of equations with respect to the target position
However, as suggested in (30), the computation of W relies on the unknown target position
Rewriting
Ignoring the second- and higher-order error terms in (31) and taking expectation result in that
4.2. Performance Analysis
We shall evaluate the efficiency of the proposed solution by comparing its covariance matrix with the CRLB in (14). By inserting (33) into (35), we have after some mathematical manipulations
Comparing (36) with the CRLB in (17), we observe that
Based on this, it can be inferred that
In other words, the covariance matrix of the proposed solution accomplishes the CRLB given sufficiently small transmitter/receiver position errors and TDOA/AOA measurement noises.
5. Numerical Examples
This section contains some numerical simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed solution. The localization scenario is set as shown in Figure 2, where a MIMO passive radar system comprised of N = 6 geographically separated receivers and M = 4 transmitters is deployed to locate a target at position
[figure omitted; refer to PDF]
Table 1
Positions of the transmitters and receivers.
| Transmitter | TX1 | TX2 | TX3 | TX4 | Receiver | RX1 | RX2 | RX3 | RX4 | RX5 | RX6 |
| –200 | –200 | 200 | 200 | –450 | 450 | 0 | 600 | –600 | 0 | ||
| –300 | 300 | 300 | –300 | –450 | 450 | 600 | 0 | 0 | –600 | ||
| 250 | 100 | 80 | 120 | 200 | 100 | 200 | 150 | 150 | 100 |
In order to simulate a practical localization scenario, zero-mean Gaussian noises with known covariance matrices
5.1. CRLB Comparison
In this section, in order to evaluate how sensitive the target localization accuracy is with respect to the transmitter and receiver position errors, we compare the CRLBs with and without transmitter/receiver position errors, under different TDOA/AOA measurement noise and transmitter/receiver position error levels. The comparison results are exhibited in Figure 3.
[figures omitted; refer to PDF]
Figure 3(a) presents the CRLBs with and without transmitter/receiver position error as TDOA measurement noise level
5.2. Performance Comparison
Now, we proceed to evaluate the localization RMSE of the proposed solution by comparing with two typical algorithms, that is, Noroozi1’s method in [18] and Amiri’s method in [ [19]], under different measurement noise and transmitter/receiver position error levels. In order to achieve a more comprehensive insight on the performance of the proposed solution, we consider two cases, that is, an ideal case where the transmitter and receiver position errors are negligibly small and a nonideal case where the transmitter and receiver position errors are significant. We first address the ideal case. The comparison results are presented in Figure 4.
[figures omitted; refer to PDF]
Figure 4 depicts the localization RMSE curves of the algorithms for different TDOA/AOA measurement noise levels in the ideal case. As expected, when there are no transmitter and receiver position errors, three algorithms generally perform comparably on the whole. At small TDOA/AOA measurement noise levels, the RMSE curves of the three algorithms match the CRLB very well. With the increase of TDOA/AOA measurement noise levels, the RMSE curves rise correspondingly and deviate gradually from the CRLB. And the deviation from the CRLB, known as the thresholding phenomenon, is owing to the discarded second and higher-order error terms in the derivation of the algorithms, which is invalid for large measurement noise levels. However, it is worth noting that, after deviating from CRLB, the localization RMSE of Noroozi’s method is slightly higher than that of Amiri’s method and the proposed solution. The reason may be that Noroozi’s method requires two WLS stages while Amiri’s method and the proposed solution require only one WLS stage, which means Noroozi’s method has to discard more second and higher-order error terms.
Next, we consider a more practical case, where the transmitter and receiver position errors cannot be ignored. The results are given in Figure 5.
[figures omitted; refer to PDF]
Figures 5(a) and 5(b) give the RMSE curves of the algorithms under different TDOA measurement noise levels and AOA measurement noises, respectively. The transmitter and receiver position errors level is set to
5.3. GDOP Analysis
In order to assess the effect of varying the target position on the proposed solution, we use the contour plots of the geometrical dilution of precision (GDOP) values defined as
[figures omitted; refer to PDF]
Figure 6(a) presents the GDOP contours at
5.4. Computation Complexity Comparison
The computational complexity is also an important index for performance evaluation. In what follows, to evaluate the proposed solution in terms of computational complexity, we count the average running time of the algorithms from 5000 independent Monte Carlo runs. The main configuration of the computer is shown as follows: Intel(R) Core(TM) CPU [email protected]; 8.00 G RAM; Windows 10 64 bit Operating System; Matlab 2018a Software. The comparison results are given in Table 2.
Table 2
Time cost of the algorithms.
| Algorithms | Average run time (ms) |
| Noroozi1’s method | 1.76 |
| Amiri’s method | 0.98 |
| Proposed solution | 2.66 |
As presented in Table 2, the time cost of Noroozi1’s method is almost twice higher than that of Amiri’s method. This is because Noroozi1’s method needs two WLS stages while Amiri’s method identifies the target position in only one WLS stage. The proposed solution incurs the highest time cost among the algorithms, approximately 3 times higher than Amiri’s method. This is not surprising since the proposed solution took the transmitter and receiver position errors into account while Noroozi1 and Amiri’s methods do not. That is to say, it is at the expense of the higher computation cost that the proposed solution achieves higher localization accuracy. However, in view of the significant performance enhancement, the increased computation cost is worthy and acceptable.
6. Conclusions
Target localization from time difference of arrival (TDOA) and angle of arrival (AOA) measurements using multitransmitter multireceiver passive radar system requires very precise knowledge of the transmitter and receiver positions. A small error in the transmitter and receiver positions may result in a significant degradation in target localization accuracy. Hence, this paper addresses a practically motivated scenario, where the transmitter and receiver positions are not known perfectly and only the nominal values are available for processing. To minimize the influence of transmitter and receiver position errors on target localization accuracy, we proposed a novel algebraic solution to improve the target position estimate. By taking the transmitter and receiver position errors into consideration in the measurement model, the proposed solution can achieve the CRLB, no matter whether there exist transmitter and receiver position errors or not. Both theoretical performance analysis and numerical simulations are performed to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed solution over existing algorithms.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 62071490 and Henan Excellent Youth Fund under Grant 212300410095.
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Abstract
This paper deals with the problem of determining the position of a single target from time difference of arrival (TDOA) and angle of arrival (AOA) measurements using multitransmitter multireceiver passive radar system with widely separated antennas. A practically motivating scenario where the transmitter and receiver positions are contaminated by errors is addressed. First, the reduction in localization accuracy due to the presence of transmitter and receiver position errors is derived through the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) analysis. Then, a novel algebraic localization algorithm based on weighted least squares minimization is proposed that takes the transmitter and receiver position errors into consideration to reduce the estimation error. The proposed solution is shown theoretically to reach the CRLB even when the transmitter and receiver positions have errors. Simulation results also verify the theoretical developments and the performance improvement of the proposed solution over existing algorithms.
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