Performance Analysis of Wavefront Curvature Methods for Range Estimation of a Moving Source

0018-9251/95/$4.00 @ 1995 IEEE In numerous practical situations a large array of sensors is required, especially for improving the system ability to detect and track moving sources. However, the array performances are strongly affected by the lack of stationarity of the impinging signals which is due to multiple factors like time-varying source models, medium, and array. Here, we are chiefly concerned with the effects of the source motions on the array processing performance. The use of a large array of sensors allow us to perform the source localization by using the wavefront curvature. It is, typically, an instantaneous localization method since it assumes that the received signals are stationary during the observation time. On the opposite, the bearings-only target motion analysis methods rely upon a nonstationary source model. As it is shown, the performance of wavefront curvature methods may be greatly affected by the source motions.