Abstract: Passive source localization via a maximum likelihood (ML) estimator can achieve a high accuracy but involves high calculation burdens, especially when based on time-of-arrival and frequency-of-arrival measurements for its internal nonlinearity and nonconvex nature. In this paper, we use the Pincus theorem and Monte Carlo importance sampling (MCIS) to achieve an approximate global solution to the ML problem in a computationally efficient manner. The main contribution is that we construct a probability density function (PDF) of Gaussian distribution, which is called an important function for efficient sampling, to approximate the ML estimation related to complicated distributions. The improved performance of the proposed method is attributed to the optimal selection of the important function and also the guaranteed convergence to a global maximum. This process greatly reduces the amount of calculation, but an initial solution estimation is required resulting from Taylor series expansion. However, the MCIS method is robust to this prior knowledge for point sampling and correction of importance weights. Simulation results show that the proposed method can achieve the Cramér-Rao lower bound at a moderate Gaussian noise level and outperforms the existing methods.

Key words: Passive source localization; Time of arrival (TOA); Frequency of arrival (FOA); Monte Carlo importance sampling (MCIS); Maximum likelihood (ML)

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