Mobile emitter position tracking with distributed observatories: Improved particle filter and joint screening method

In this paper, we present a novel particle filter (PF)-based direct position tracking method utilizing multiple distributed observation stations. Traditional passive tracking methods are anchored on repetitive position estimation, where the set of consecutive estimates provides the tracking trajectory, such as Two-step and direct position determination methods. However, duplicate estimates can be computationally expensive. In addition, these techniques suffer from data association problems. The PF algorithm is a tracking method that avoids these drawbacks, but the conventional PF algorithm is unable to construct a likelihood function from the received signals of multiple observatories to determine the weights of particles. Therefore, we developed an improved PF algorithm with the likelihood function modified by the projection approximation subspace tracking with deflation (PASTd) algorithm. The proposed algorithm uses the projection subspace and spectral function to replace the likelihood function of PF. Then, the weights of particles are calculated jointly by multiple likelihood functions. Finally, the tracking problem of multiple targets is solved by multiple sets of particles. Simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of computational complexity and tracking accuracy.