Direct position tracking method for non-circular signals with distributed passive arrays via first-order approximation

In this study, a direct position tracking method for non-circular (NC) signals using distributed passive arrays is proposed. First, we calculate the initial positions of sources using a direct position determination (DPD) approach; next, we transform the tracking into a compensation problem. The offsets of the adjacent time positions are calculated using a first-order Taylor expansion. The fusion calculation of the noise subspace is performed according to the NC characteristics. Because the proposed method uses the signal information from the previous iteration, it can realize automatic data associations. Compared with traditional DPD and two-step localization methods, our novel process has lower computational complexity and provides higher accuracy. Moreover, its performance is better than that of the traditional tracking methods. Numerous simulation results support the superiority of our proposed method.