High‐Precision Localisation of Coherent Emitters via Iterative SDF‐DPD on Mobile Platforms

ABSTRACT

The proliferation of illegal radiation sources significantly threatens reliable communication and stable operation of industrial facilities. This paper addresses the simultaneous localisation of multiple unknown emitters using large‐scale UAV‐collected monitoring data. Conventional direct position determination (DPD) methods suffer from non‐uniform observation errors and are highly sensitive to environmental variations. Additionally, most traditional subspace‐based approaches require subarray‐based spatial smoothing for source localisation. To overcome these limitations, this work proposes an iterative direct localisation algorithm. This algorithm does not require subarray‐based spatial smoothing and works in both partially and fully coherent signal environments. It operates by iteratively removing coherent components from the reconstructed signal covariance matrix without requiring subarray‐based spatial smoothing, thus preserving full array aperture. A key advantage of this approach is its larger effective aperture than those of the conventional subarray‐based spatial smoothing methods, which significantly enhances localisation accuracy. Numerical simulations demonstrate its superiority, showing higher localisation accuracy and resolution than conventional two‐step methods and subspace data fusion‐based DPD approaches.