A low-cost AOA-TDOA approach for blind geolocation in multi-paths context

This paper proposes a low cost joint AOA-TDOA estimation strategy to locate multi-emitters in multi-paths contexts, without prior information on the transmitted signals. The proposed strategy consists in dividing the multi-emitter geolocation problem in multiple mono-emitters location ones. An AOA algorithm is firstly performed on the array of sensors of the main station and a spatial filtering with an ad hoc correlation based criterion selects the LOS paths. In a second step thanks to an auxiliary station, TDOAs are computed for each emitter which is then located with conventional AOA-TDOA techniques. The innovation consists in a simple strategy that avoid frequent ambiguities which arise when using separately estimated parameters in a multiple emitters context.