Performance Analysis of Bearing-Only Target Location Algorithms

The performance of two well known bearing only location techniques, the maximum likelihood (ML) and the Stans field estimators, is examined. Analytical expressions are obtained for the bias and the covariance matrix of the estimation error, which permit performance comparison for any case of interest. It is shown that the Stansfield algorithm provides biased estimates even for large numbers of measurements, in contrast with the ML method. The rms error of the Stansfield technique is not necessarily larger than the rms of the ML technique. However, it is shown that the ML technique is superior to the Stansfield method when the number of measurements is large enough. Simulation results verify the predicted theoretical performance.