High resolution time delay estimation

A new method is presented for estimating the arrival times of deterministic signal pulses that are separated by less than the duration of the signal autocorrelation function. The method is based on the observation that if the signal has a flat band-limited spectrum, then the maximum-likelihood estimator for the signal time of arrivals can be approximately implemented as an unweighted least-squares exponential fitting problem. An improved linear prediction algorithm for high resolution exponential parameter estimation is then used to estimate the time of arrivals. The proposed method is tested via computer simulation and it´s performance is compared against the Cramer-Rao lower bound.