Time delay estimation using wavelet denoising maximum likelihood method for underwater reverberant environment

Abstract

Time delay estimation (TDE) between receivers plays a significant role in various fields such as radar, sonar, global positioning system, and underwater communications. TDE is the first step in the localisation and tracking of the source. Estimation of the time delay of a passive sonar system in a reverberant environment is one of the most challenging tasks. For some decades, the well-known generalised cross-correlation (GCC) method has been implemented to estimate the time delay. By using various pre-filters in the GCC method, the quality of TDE has improved in various cases. In this work, the use of wavelet denoising for TDE in a passive sonar system has been proposed. The proposed method uses the denoised signal in a maximum likelihood estimator in the reverberant environment to estimate the time delay. The proposed method is efficient for the underwater reverberant environment.