High-Resolution Direct Position Determination Using MVDR

The direct position determination (DPD) approach is a single-step method, which uses the maximum likelihood estimator to localize sources emitting electromagnetic energy using combined data from all available sensors. The DPD is known to outperform the traditional two-step methods under low signal-to-noise ratio conditions. We propose an improvement to the DPD approach, using the well-known minimum-variance-distortionless-response (MVDR) approach. Unlike maximum likelihood, the number of sources needs not be known before applying the method. The combination of both the direct approach and MVDR yields unprecedented localization accuracy and resolution for weak sources. We demonstrate this approach on the problem of multistatic radar, but the method can easily be extended to general localization problems.