Geolocation of a known altitude target using azimuth angle measurements

This paper considers geolocating a target with known altitude using azimuth angle measurements obtained at multiple spatially separated ground sensors. Under Gaussian noise model, the target position Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRL-B) is derived and the geolocation problem is formulated as an inequality-constrained weighted least squares (WLS) optimization problem. A new two-step algorithm that mainly involves the bisection search and root-finding operations is proposed to solve it globally. We show analytically and by simulations that the proposed method can attain the CRLB accuracy when the angle measurement noise is small.