Geometric Approach to Passive Ranging in Underwater Localization Systems

The use of underwater surveillance systems is critical for effective command of maritime power. Ships or submarines equipped with active sonar systems emit sounds to obtain range or angle information. Unfortunately, security issues may occur in this situation. To meet the security considerations for obtaining location information, a passive tracking or localization technique, the bearings-only target motion analysis (BO-TMA), was developed along with a given direction of arrival (DOA) estimation. With limited resources, a passive ranging approach with only a single passive array is practical, and is considered in this paper. In this paper, we propose a new geometric approach and derive a closed-form solution, which can be implemented in BO-TMA algorithms for initiation and updating the range of targets with a single passive sensor. Finally, analysis and simulation results showed that the proposed scheme can achieve good performance and is effective for a short operation time, such that an observer can move with more flexibility in combat scenarios. The proposed algorithm can further be performed by trackers to generate the initiation information and hence reduce the estimation bias.