New distortion measures for data compression for emitter location

Data compression methods commonly focus on mean-square error (MSE) distortion. However, in TDOA/FDOA emitter location the distortion measure should focus on parameter accuracy. This paper discusses the proper choice of a distortion measure for this problem. We show that MSE is a poor choice for two reasons: (i) increased MSE may not even effect the parameter accuracy, and (ii) there are other factors that must be considered (e.g., the signal´s RMS bandwidth/duration and the relative usefulness of TDOA vs. FDOA). We propose a new measure that captures the true impact of compression and illustrate its importance through a few simple examples.