An experimental comparison of the cross correlation and SCOT techniques for time delay estimation

In the interest of localizing underwater acoustic sources, several digital signal processing techniques have been proposed for the important intermediate step of time delay estimation. One such method is the SCOT (Smoothed Coherence Transform) method which is designed to counteract the undesirable effects of strong sinusoids. The purpose of this paper is to compare the performance of the SCOT with the standard cross correlation method when sinusoids are not present. Under these conditions it is shown that the cross correlation method outperforms the SCOT. The results so obtained are compared with some of those published recently.