A system and method for detecting an object of interest. An embodiment of a system or method may include receiving an indication an object of interest is present in a first area; obtaining, at the first area, a first set of unique characteristics of a respective set of mobile communication devices; receiving an indication the object of interest is present in a second area; obtaining, at the second area, a second set of characteristics of a respective second set of mobile communication devices; and associating a unique characteristic of a mobile communication device with the object of interest based on the first and second sets of characteristics.

A terminal that receives carrier signals with start point information indicated thereon from three or more base stations (BSs) including a serving BS, calculates a difference in phase angles between carrier signals of two BSs while changing the two BSs by using the start point information of the carrier signals of the two BSs among the three or more BSs, and calculates coordinates of the terminal by using the calculated differences in distance of arrival is provided.

A system and method are provided for detecting direction of movement. The system includes at least two radio frequency identification (RFID) readers arranged in different locations. The RFID readers transmit respective location signals from their locations and receive corresponding response signals from a portable electronic device (PED) when the PED is within range to receive the corresponding location signals, respectively. The system includes a controller configured to determine whether the individual response signals received by the RFID readers respectively satisfy a predetermined condition at a first time and a second time subsequent to the first time. The controller is also configured to determine a direction of movement of the portable electronic device relative to the locations of the RFID readers during the first and second times based on whether the response signals respectively satisfy the predetermined condition at the first and second times.

A method for jointly estimating gain-phase error and direction of arrival (DOA) based on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) array includes: equipping each UAV with an antenna, and forming a receive array through a swarm of multiple UAVs to receive source signals; when an observation baseline of the swarm remains unchanged, changing array manifold through movement of the UAVs, and re-sensing the source signals; for each sensed source signals, calculating a covariance matrix, and obtaining a corresponding noise subspace through eigenvalue decomposition; and constructing a quadratic optimization problem based on the noise subspace and array steering vector, constructing a cost function, and implementing joint estimation of the gain-phase error and the DOA through spectrum peak search. The method can jointly estimate the DOA and gain-phase error and calibrate the gain-phase error, thereby improving accuracy of passive positioning.

This invention describes a new Direction Finding (DF) algorithm named as Braided Array Sampling via an Inter-Channel Scheme (BASICS) that can enhance estimation accuracy of the direction of arrival (DOA) to a higher level than existing algorithms. It is originally developed from, and designed for high frequency (HF) radars detecting sea echoes. With appropriate analogical reasoning, it can be applied to all kinds of radars and sonars. It breaks the ordinary belief that an array of N sonars can only generate N pictures of spectral for analysis. Without the need of improvement on the hardware, BASICS assumes virtual movements of sonars in order to produce much more than N spectral for computers to analyze, and therefore provides much more accurate DOA estimation of targets on the sea. This invention presents the principle of BASICS and its theoretical supports, as well as the basic conditions to apply BASICS.

An embodiment of the invention provides a method of determining a location of a mobile target that processes locations for the target provided by a wireless location technology tracker system to determine moving averages of velocity of the target, determines if the locations are outliers responsive to the moving averages, discards locations that are determined to be outliers, and uses locations determined not to be outliers as locations for the target.

Embodiments of the present invention provide a positioning method, including: determining, by a positioning server, positioning signal configuration information; sending, by the positioning server, the positioning signal configuration information to a positioning signal sending entity; obtaining, by the positioning server, a measurement estimation result of a shortest transmission path between a positioning signal measurement entity and the positioning signal sending entity; and positioning, by the positioning server, a terminal by using the measurement estimation result of the shortest transmission path, where the terminal is one of the positioning signal measurement entity and the positioning signal sending entity. The embodiments of the present invention can resist an NLOS path deviation and a positioning signal strength loss and an SINR loss, so as to improve the positioning accuracy.

Systems and methods for performing distance and velocity measurements, such as by using carrier signals, are disclosed. A measurement system device may include a first antenna configured to receive a first signal from a transmitting device, the first signal having a carrier frequency, and a second antenna configured to receive the first signal from the transmitting device. The measurement system device may also include a processor configured to determine a first differential distance between the first antenna and the second antenna from the transmitting device and to determine a rate of change of the first differential distance. The processor may also be configured to estimate a geometry of the measurement system device relative to the transmitting device using the rate of change of the first differential distance.

Some embodiments use scanning devices to characterize radio signals received at a number of locations within a geographical area of interest. The signal characteristics along with the location information associated with the characteristics are stored in a centralized reference database. A mobile device characterizes signals it receives at a certain location and compares the characteristics with the signal characteristics stored in the reference database to obtain accurate location information of the certain location.

An apparatus, method and computer program for a mobile transceiver and for a base station transceiver. The method includes receiving a downlink signal from a base station transceiver of the mobile communication system via a downlink data channel, identifying a line of sight component of at least the first positioning symbol of the downlink signal based on the one or more sequences of zero-value samples and determining information related to a location of the mobile transceiver based on the one or more non-zero-value samples received within the line of sight component of the first positioning symbol. The downlink signal includes one or more positioning symbols having a first positioning symbol, wherein the first positioning symbol is based on samples in a time domain to be transmitted by the base station transceiver.