Time-of-flight estimation using extended matched filtering

Abstract

The problem considered is the estimation of the ToF (time-of-flight) of an acoustic tone burst in a reflective environment. Secondary echoes cause a complex interference pattern. Only the ToF of the first echo is of interest. Conventional matched filtering (MF) cannot cope with overlapping echoes. An explicit model for overlapping echoes leads to a generalized MF consisting of a parallel bank of filters rather than just a single filter. The new method is evaluated with a dataset of 150 records of observed waveforms using 3-fold cross validation.