Time Delay Estimation in Room Acoustic Environments: An Overview
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Time Delay Estimation in Room Acoustic Environments: An Overview Jingdong Chen,1 Jacob Benesty,2 and Yiteng (Arden) Huang1 1 Bell
Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, NJ 07974, USA Universit´e du Qu´ebec, 800 de la Gaucheti`ere Ouest, Suite 6900, Montr´eal, Qu´ebec, Canada H5A 1K6
2 INRS-EMT,
Received 31 January 2005; Revised 6 September 2005; Accepted 26 September 2005 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. Copyright © 2006 Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.
1.
INTRODUCTION
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. Depending on the nature of its application, TDE can be dichotomized into two broad categories, namely, the time of arrival (TOA) estimation [1–4] and the time difference of arrival (TDOA) estimation [5–8]. The former aims at measuring the time delay between the transmission of a pulse signal and the reception of its echo, which is often of primary interest to an active system such as radar and active sonar; while the latter, as its name indicates, endeavors to determine the travel time of a wavefront between two spatially separated receiving sensors, which is often of concern to a passive system such as passive sonars and microphone array systems. Although there exists intrinsic relationship between the TOA and TDOA estimation, their essential difference is literally profound. In the former case, the “clean” reference signal, that is, the transmitted signal, is known, such that the time delay estimate can be obtained based on a single sensor generally using the matched filter approach. On the contrary,
in the latter, no such explicit reference signal is available, and the delay estimate is often acquired by comparing the signals received at two (or more) spatially separated sen
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