Locating closely spaced coherent emitters using TDOA techniques

This paper considers the problem of locating closely-spaced coherent emitters. Classical TDOA-based emitter location methods assume only a single emitter is being estimated. As a result, when multiple emitters that cannot be resolved during detection exist, the MSE performance is significantly degraded. These errors are due to the fact that the TDOA observation model does not account for multiple transmissions. We propose a new TDOA observation model that can resolve multiple emitted signals. We show a significant improvement in MSE when locating multiple emitters using our new model as compared with the classical one-emitter assumption TDOA model.