Robust Multichannel Acoustic Time Delay Estimation in Reverberant Environments

M. H. Hennecke and G. A. Fink
9. ITG Fachtagung Sprachkommunikation, 2010.

Bochum, Germany

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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 could be achieved if multiple channels are used. 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 real recordings, a comparative performance evaluation shows the robustness of the proposed method.