Robust Multichannel Acoustic Time Delay Estimation in Reverberant Environments

Abstract:
Time delay estimation is a basic building block of an acoustic source localization system. Such a system must cope with adverse acoustic conditions to be generally applicable, i.e. high reverberation times and low signal-to-noise ratios. In general, better results can be achieved if multiple channels are considered. We propose an extension of a mutual information based delay estimator to the multichannel case. Additionally, we give a unified description of the proposed estimator, the generalized cross-correlation and its multichannel counterpart. Using simulated and real recordings, a comparative performance evaluation shows the robustness of the proposed method under adverse acoustic conditions.