Design and Analysis of a Non-Iterative Estimator for Target Location in Multistatic Sonar Systems with Sensor Position Uncertainties

• Main Authors: Xin Wang, Zhi Yu, Le Yang, Ji Li
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-01-01
• Series: Mathematics
• Subjects: multistatic sonar; target location; hybrid cramér–rao bound; weighted least squares; nonlinear estimation; non-iterative estimator; perturbation analysis; linear model; bias analysis; complexity analysis
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7390/8/1/129

Target location is the basic application of a multistatic sonar system. Determining the position/velocity vector of a target from the related sonar observations is a nonlinear estimation problem. The presence of possible sensor position uncertainties turns this problem into a more challenging hybrid parameter estimation problem. Conventional gradient-based iterative estimators suffer from the problems of initialization difficulties and local convergence. Even if there is no problem with initialization and convergence, a large computational cost is required in most cases. In view of these drawbacks, we develop a computationally efficient non-iterative position/velocity estimator. The main numerical computation involved is the weighted least squares optimization, which makes the estimator computationally efficient. Parameter transformation, model linearization and two-stage processing are exploited to prevent the estimator from iterative computation. Through performance analysis and experimental verification, we find that the proposed estimator reaches the hybrid Cramér−Rao bound and has linear computational complexity.