Application of Iterative Maximum Weighted Likelihood Estimation in 3-D Target Localization

Time-of-flight (ToF)-based 3-D target localization is a very challenging topic because of the pseudo-targets introduced by ToF measurement errors in traditional ToF-based methods. Although the influence of errors in ToF measurement can be reduced by the probability-based ToF method, the accuracy of localization is not very high. This paper proposes a new 3-D target localization method, Iterative Maximum Weighted Likelihood Estimation (IMWLE), that takes into account the spatial distribution of pseudo-targets. In our method, each pseudo-target is initially assigned an equal weight. At each iteration, Maximum Weighted Likelihood Estimation (MWLE) is adopted to fit a Gaussian distribution to all pseudo-target positions and assign new weight factors to them. The weight factors of the pseudo-targets, which are far from the target, are reduced to minimize their influence on localization. Therefore, IMWLE can reduce the influence of pseudo-targets that are far from the target and improve the accuracy of localization. The experiments were carried out in a water tank to test the performance of the IMWLE method. Results revealed that the estimated target area can be narrowed down to the target using IMWLE and a point estimate of target location can also be obtained, which shows that IMWLE has a higher degree of accuracy than the probability-based ToF method.