An improved accumulated cross-power spectrum phase method for time delay estimation

Acoustic source localization based on time delay estimation (TDE) is one of the core of the method in hearing aids. However, the estimation accuracy is often affected by noise and reverberation. In order to solve the problem, in this paper, an improved method based on accumulated cross-power spectrum phase is proposed. This method uses a modified weighting function to sharpen the peak of the correlation function, and it introduces voice activity detection (VAD) to eliminate noise frames to improve the estimation accuracy. The simulation results show that, in both noisy and reverberant environments, the proposed method can improve the performance of TDE significantly.