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Bayesian Multilateration
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  • Alisson Alencar ,
  • César Mattos ,
  • João Gomes ,
  • Diego Mesquita
Alisson Alencar
Federal Institute of Ceará

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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César Mattos
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João Gomes
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Diego Mesquita
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Abstract

Multilateration (MLAT) is the de facto standard to localize points of interest (POIs) in navigation and surveillance systems. Despite sensors being inherently noisy, most existing techniques i) are oblivious to noise patterns in sensor measurements; and ii) only provide point estimates of the POI’s location. This often results in unreliable estimates with high variance, i.e., that are highly sensitive to measurement noise. To overcome this caveat, we advocate the use of Bayesian modeling. Using Bayesian statistics, we provide a comprehensive guide to handle uncertainties in MLAT. We provide principled choices for the likelihood function and the prior distributions. Inference within the resulting model follows standard MCMC techniques. Besides coping with unreliable measurements, our framework can also deal with sensors whose location is not completely known, which is an asset in mobile systems. The proposed solution also naturally incorporates multiple measurements per reference point, a common practical situation that is usually not handled directly by other approaches. Comprehensive experiments with both synthetic and real-world data indicate that our Bayesian approach to the MLAT task provides better position estimation and uncertainty quantification when compared to the available alternatives.
2022Published in IEEE Signal Processing Letters volume 29 on pages 962-966. 10.1109/LSP.2022.3161122