Source localization is an important research topic that has many applications in radar, sonar, navigation, and wireless communication systems. Signal sensing using a single node has many restrictions, e.g. limited sensing range, high signal to noise (SNR) requirement, and unavailable spatial information generally. To overcome these drawbacks, the development of distributed nodes is a future trend. Source localization techniques based on distributed sensing have been developed rapidly, and well-known methods like time of arrival (TOA), time difference of arrival (TDOA), received signal strength (RSS), and angle of arrival (AOA) have been established. Nevertheless, these are all two-step methods that first need to estimate intermediate parameters, so the error accumulation and parameter mismatch problems limit the localization performance.

Recently, the direct position determination (DPD) technique, which directly estimates the signal positions from original data, has been investigated. Since DPD methods make full use of the correlation between the data batches received at different positions and avoid the estimations of the intermediate parameters, the localization performance can be improved greatly. Meanwhile, the match problem between the sources and parameters in a multiple-source scenario is naturally eliminated. However, the DPD techniques also suffer from the high computation complexity and heterogeneous data fusion problem, so there are still urgent requirements for new mathematical computing theories and data fusion methods for DPD.

Therefore, this Special Issue aims to collate advanced distributed sensing and processing methods for source DPD. Review articles focused on the current state of the art are also encouraged.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Passive DPD based on distributed sensors
• Target DPD in distributed radar system
• Passive distributed architecture design for DPD
• Distributed radar system design for target DPD
• Distributed data fusion for DPD
• Fast DPD method
• Performance analysis for DPD
• DPD based on distributed arrays
• Distributed array system
• Robust DPD with imperfect models
• Signal tracking based on DPD
• Dynamic distributed system adjustment for DPD