Optimal Amplitude Weighting for Near-field Passive Source Localization

In this paper, an optimal amplitude weight expression is derived and presented in closed form. The minimal error variance for location estimation of a near-field source signal that has a low time-bandwidth product is also presented. A noniterative method to calculate and apply weights is proposed to yield more robust estimation results at a lower calculational cost when compared to the traditional iterative method. Besides a theoretical evaluation, the proposed algorithm is also verified through Monte Carlo simulation. The weight expression derived also optimizes the system signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), hence it can be applied to improve the performance of any estimator/detector that utilizes the energy in the sum of sensor output signals.