Robust time delay estimation for noise corrupted sinusoidal signals

Estimation of time delay between signals received at two spatially separated sensors has considerable practical importance in the applications like source localization, direction finding etc., in RADAR, SONAR and other communication systems. In this paper cross correlation is used as the time delay estimation method. Prior to the delay estimation, the received signals are de-noised by AdaBoost based EMD technique. The performance of the delay estimation is significantly degraded by the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) level and hence this factor has been considered as a principal factor. The simulation results of the proposed method are compared with the basic EMD as a de-noising technique at various SNR levels. The results show that the proposed method improves the resolution in the delay estimation in the noisy environment.