Multi hypothesis parameter tracking in relative time of arrival

The passive non-cooperative localization and tracking of mobile terminals in urban scenarios, called blind mobile localization (BML), is a highly demanding task which occurs for instance in safety, emergency and security applications. In BML the measurement set consists out of several multipaths which are usually parametrized by their direction of arrival (DoA) and their relative time of arrival (RToA). Clutter multipaths can occur due to obstacles like pedestrians, cars, etc. near the receiver side. If a clutter multipath is received before the first measurement of a target, i.e., if it possesses a negative RToA compared to the target related measurements, the computation of the particular likelihood function is deteriorated and thus the accuracy of any BML fusion algorithm decreases. In this paper a pre-processing of the measurement set by an application of a multi-hypothesis tracking (MOT) in the parameter space is proposed. Therefore, two extensions of the MOT-approach processing additional global clutter hypothesis are derived. Finally, a ray-tracing simulation is used to numerically assess the proposed methods for different clutter levels in terms of the optimal subpattern assignment (OSPA) metric.