Time Delay Estimation in Spatial Noisy and Reverberant Environments

This paper proposes an eigenvalue decomposition algorithm for robust time-delay estimation (TDE) based on triple microphone in situations where reverberation and spatial noise are present. This algorithm regards time delay estimation with spatial noise and reverberation as a blind channel identification issue of a double-input triple-output system, and use lag correlation matrix to reduce the spatial noise. Indeed, the room impulse responses between the sources and the microphone signals are included in the eigenvector corresponding to the minimum eigenvalue of the lag correlation matrix of the three microphone signals, and therefore time delay can be estimated from the eigenvector. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm performs well when both spatial noise and reverberation exist.