Improved TDOA disambiguation techniques for sound source localization in reverberant environments

Abstract

Given a single sound source in a non reverberant environment, an estimate of the Time Difference Of Arrival (TDOA) between microphones can be obtained by observing the time value at which the cross correlation of the two microphone signals displays a maximum. In the presence of reverberation, however, the cross correlation function displays a great number of local maxima caused by reflected signals blending unpredictably. This results in TDOA estimation ambiguity, making correct source localization impossile. The aim of this work is to present an improved disambiguation algorithm and compare it to existing algorithms in terms of estimation accuracy and processing time.