Target localization technology has been intensively studied and broadly applied in many fields. This paper presents one improved particle swarm optimization technique in training a back-propagation neural network for position estimation in target localization. The proposed scheme combines particle swarm optimization (PSO), back-propagation neural network (BP), adaptive inertia weight and hybrid mutation, called IPSO-BP. To verify the proposed IPSO-BP approach, comparisons between the PSO-based BP approach (PSO-BP) and general back-propagation neural network (BP) are made. The computational results show that the proposed IPSO-BP approach exhibits much better performance in the training process and better prediction ability in the validation process than those using the other two base line approaches.