Effects of room reverberation on time-delay estimation performance

Previously, time-delay estimation (TDE) between two or more microphones has been proposed as a means for the passive localization of a talker in an audio-conference room. The authors present a simulation study of the effects of room reverberation on the performance of the maximum likelihood (ML) estimator of the time delay, which is obtained by maximizing the output of a generalized cross-correlator. To this end, synthetic microphone signals are generated with the image model technique and are used to evaluate the bias, variance and probability of anomaly of the ML estimator as a function of the room reflection coefficients and other external parameters of interest. The results clearly demonstrate the adverse effects of room reverberation on MLTDE performance. Qualitative and quantitative explanations of these effects are provided