Disambiguation of TDOA Estimates in Multi-Path Multi-Source Environments (DATEMM)

One major problem of time delay estimation for acoustic localization in multi-source reverberant environments is the ambiguity in identifying out of many peaks of generalized cross-correlation the desired time differences of arrival (TDOAs) caused by direct paths and in assigning them correctly to individual sources. In this paper, we propose a novel geometrically motivated approach "disambiguation of TDOA estimates in multi-path multi-source environments" (DATEMM). It utilizes additional information from the auto-correlation of sensor signals and a zero TDOA sum condition to suppress spurious TDOA estimates. Furthermore, this method can be used as an add-on module to improve the robustness of any existing TDOA estimation method