Disambiguation of TDOA Estimation for Multiple Sources in Reverberant Environments

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach to estimate the time difference of arrival (TDOA) for multiple sources in reverberant environments. It resolves ambiguities in TDOA estimation caused by multipath propagation and multiple sources. By exploiting two TDOA constraints, the raster condition and the zero cyclic sum condition, we are able to identify and reject the echo path TDOAs and to assign the direct path TDOAs correctly to different sources. For the latter purpose, an efficient algorithm for the synthesis of approximately consistent TDOA graphs has been developed. A real experiment demonstrates the superior performance of our algorithms.