Time delay estimation in a reverberant environment by low rate sampling of impulsive acoustic sources

Abstract

This paper presents a new method of time delay estimation (TDE) using low sample rates of an impulsive acoustic source in a room environment. The proposed method finds the time delay from the room impulse response (RIR) which makes it robust against room reverberations. The RIR is considered a sparse phenomenon and a recently proposed sparse signal reconstruction technique called orthogonal clustering (OC) is utilized for its estimation from the low rate sampled received signal. The arrival time of the direct path signal at a pair of microphones is identified from the estimated RIR and their difference yields the desired time delay. Low sampling rates reduce the hardware and computational complexity and decrease the communication between the microphones and the centralized location. The performance of the proposed technique is demonstrated by numerical simulations and experimental results.

Joint Frequency and Time Estimation Algorithms

“…It has also played important roles in many applications in areas such as radio astronomy, speech analysis and biomedical systems. On the other hand, the problem of estimating the time delay in the signals at two spatially distant sensors has been an actively researched area due to its paramount applications in a wide number of areas such as radar, sonar, biomedical, and geophysics [3][4][5][6][7]. The problem of joint estimation of time delay and frequency of multiple sinusoidal sources has been studied by Wu et al [8,9] which is based on the measured data from two spatially separated sensors.…”