Consistent and Asymptotically Efficient Localization from Bearing-only Measurements

Abstract: We study the problem of signal source localization using bearing-only measurements. Initially, we present easily verifiable geometric conditions for sensor deployment to ensure the asymptotic identifiability of the model and demonstrate the consistency and asymptotic efficiency of the maximum likelihood (ML) estimator. However, obtaining the ML estimator is challenging due to its association with a non-convex optimization problem. To address this, we propose a two-step estimator that shares the same asymptotic properties as the ML estimator while offering low computational complexity, linear in the number of measurements. The primary challenge lies in obtaining a preliminary consistent estimator in the first step. To achieve this, we construct a linear least-squares problem through algebraic operations on the measurement nonlinear model to first obtain a biased closed-form solution. We then eliminate the bias using the data to yield an asymptotically unbiased and consistent estimator. The key to this process is obtaining a consistent estimator of the variance of the sine of the noise by taking the reciprocal of the maximum eigenvalue of a specially constructed matrix from the data. In the second step, we perform a single Gauss-Newton iteration using the preliminary consistent estimator as the initial value, achieving the same asymptotic properties as the ML estimator. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed two-step estimator for large sample sizes.