High-Precision Time Delay Estimation Based on Closed-Form Offset Compensation

Abstract

To improve the estimation accuracy, a novel time delay estimation (TDE) method based on the closed-form offset compensation is proposed. Firstly, we use the generalized cross-correlation with phase transform (GCC-PHAT) method to obtain the initial TDE. Secondly, a signal model using normalized cross spectrum is established, and the noise subspace is extracted by eigenvalue decomposition (EVD) of covariance matrix. Using the orthogonal relation between the steering vector and the noise subspace, the first-order Taylor expansion is carried out on the steering vector reconstructed by the initial TDE. Finally, the offsets are compensated via simple least squares (LS). Compared to other state-of-the-art methods, the proposed method significantly reduces the computational complexity and achieves better estimation performance. Experiments on both simulation and real-world data verify the efficiency of the proposed approach.