Robust TDOA-based joint source and microphone localization in a reverberant environment using medians of acceptable recovered TOAs

Abstract

A robust method is presented for time difference of arrival (TDOA)-based joint source and microphone localization that overcomes a problem with a previously developed technique for estimating time of arrivals (TOAs) from only TDOA observations using the low-rank property of TOA measurements. In that technique, closed-form solutions for the localization are derived by TOA recovery. However, in a reverberant environment, TDOA estimation can have a large error, in which case the recovery does not work well. The method presented uses the concept of acceptable solution to find subsets of the TDOA measurements with small errors. The medians of the TOAs recovered from all TDOA measurements and all TDOA subsets yielding acceptable solutions are used for localization. Evaluation using actual data of the proposed method in a reverberant environment demonstrated its validity.