A SIMPLE AND EFFICIENT ESTIMATOR FOR HYPERBOLIC LOCATION

An effective technique in locating a source based on intersections of hyperbolic curves defined by the time differences of arrival of a sign al received at a number of sensors is proposed. The approach is nonite rative and gives an explicit solution. It is an approximate realizatio n of the maximum-likelihood estimator and is shown to attain the Crame r-Rao lower bound near the small error region. Comparisons of performa nce with existing techniques of beamformer, spherical-interpolation, d ivide and conquer, and iterative Taylor-series methods are made. The p roposed technique performs significantly better than spherical-interpo lation, and has a higher noise threshold than divide and conquer befor e performance breaks away from the Cramer-Rao lower bound. It provides an explicit solution form that is not available in the beamforming an d Taylor-series methods. Computational complexity is comparable to sph erical-interpolation but substantially less than the Taylor-series met hod.