A graph theoretical framework for consistent time differences of arrival

Abstract:
The estimation of time difference of arrival (TDOA) plays an important role in acoustic source localization, blind source separation, acoustic sound control, and improved speech communication. However, when multiple sources are active in a reverberant environment, the TDOA estimates are known to suffer from the multipath and multiple source ambiguity, and hence are less reliable. In a previous work, we introduced the idea of consistent graphs to combat these TDOA ambiguities. In this paper, we go one step further and present a graph theoretical framework to study this consistency problem. It turns out that many concepts from the graph theory are useful for this purpose.