Adaptive direct position determination of emitters based on time differences of arrival

In passive localization systems based on the time difference of arrival, conventional methods usually take two steps for localization. In the first step the time differences of arrival (TDOA) are measured, which are used for localization in the second step. This two-step approach is suboptimal since each measurement of time difference is performed independently, although all measurements correspond to a common emitter position. In this paper, an Adaptive Direct Position Determination (ADPD) approach is proposed, where the position is determined directly from the observed signals in a single step. Monte Carlo simulations validate that the accuracy of proposed ADPD method outperforms the two-step method under low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), while both methods are close to the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) under high SNRs.