Time delay estimation at multi-path based on symmetry measure of GCC function

Abstract

An improved time delay estimator based on the symmetry measurement of the generalised cross-correlation (GCC) function is proposed. At a strong reverberation case, multiple peaks are chosen from the GCC function and the peak with the best symmetry measure is determined as the time delay estimate. Computer simulation results in a room environment for different source locations show the significant improvement on the percentage of anomalies of the time delay estimates against the maximum likelihood TDE (MLTDE) and PHAT methods, it also shows that the proposed time delay estimation is robust to the presence of multi-path propagation, even under a strong reverberation condition and with the source located close to the wall.