Direct Localization of Strong and Weak Sources with a Moving Array

In the context of complex electromagnetic environments, the accurate localization of weak radiation sources is susceptible to interference or obscuration caused by powerful signals. To address this issue, this study explores a direct localization algorithm which is capable of simultaneously determining the positions of multiple strong and weak sources with a moving antenna array. By leveraging the property of noise subspace invariance, spatial spectrum are derived from the outputs obtained at different positions of the array and these spatial spectrum are subsequently merged. This moving array-based algorithm avoids the data association problem in traditional two-step localization and reduces the impact of strong signals on the estimation of weak signals. In the simulation experiments, our method is compared with traditional direct localization and other algorithms for strong and weak signal localization. The results demonstrate that the proposed method surpasses the performance of alternative approaches, particularly in scenarios characterized by a substantial power disparity between strong and weak signals.