Abstract
Time delay estimation has been a research topic of significant practical importance in many fields (radar, sonar, seismology, geophysics, ultrasonics, hands-free communications, etc.). It is a first stage that feeds into subsequent processing blocks for identifying, localizing, and tracking radiating sources. This area has made remarkable advances in the past few decades, and is continuing to progress, with an aim to create processors that are tolerant to both noise and reverberation. This paper presents a systematic overview of the state-of-the-art of time-delay-estimation algorithms ranging from the simple cross-correlation method to the advanced blind channel identification based techniques. We discuss the pros and cons of each individual algorithm, and outline their inherent relationships. We also provide experimental results to illustrate their performance differences in room acoustic environments where reverberation and noise are commonly encountered.
Highlights
Time delay estimation (TDE), which serves as the first stage that feeds into subsequent processing blocks of a system to detect, identify, and locate radiating sources, has plenty of applications in fields as diverse as radar, sonar, seismology, geophysics, ultrasonics, and communications
Depending on the nature of its application, TDE can be dichotomized into two broad categories, namely, the time of arrival (TOA) estimation [1,2,3,4] and the time difference of arrival (TDOA) estimation [5,6,7,8]
A great deal of efforts have been devoted to analyzing the TDE performance of the generalized cross-correlation (GCC) technique in reverberant environments [66, 67]; but not much comparison has been made between correlation and system-identification-based algorithms
Summary
Time delay estimation (TDE), which serves as the first stage that feeds into subsequent processing blocks of a system to detect, identify, and locate radiating sources, has plenty of applications in fields as diverse as radar, sonar, seismology, geophysics, ultrasonics, and communications. It has attracted a considerable amount of research attention, ever since sensor arrays were introduced to measure a propagating wavefield. We will make no distinction between TDE and TDOA estimation unless necessary
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