Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have become a significant technology in recent years. They can be widely used in many applications. WSNs consist of a large number of sensor nodes and each of them is energy-constrained and low-power dissipation. Most of the sensor nodes are tiny sensors with small memories and do not acquire their own locations. This means determining the locations of the unknown sensor nodes is one of the key issues in WSN. In this paper, an improved APIT algorithm HTCRL (Homothetic Triangle Cyclic Refinement Location) is proposed, which is based on the principle of the homothetic triangle. It adopts perpendicular median surface cutting to narrow down target area in order to decrease the average localization error rate. It reduces the probability of misjudgment by adding the conditions of judgment. It can get a relatively high accuracy compared with the typical APIT algorithm without any additional hardware equipment or increasing the communication overhead.