A pitch-based approach to time-delay estimation of reverberant speech

Generalized cross-correlation (GCC) has been the traditional method for estimating the relative time-delay associated with speech signals received by a pair of microphones in a reverberant, noisy environment. The filtering criterion employed is either focussed on the signal degradations due to additive noise or those due exclusively to multipath channel effects. There has been relatively little success at applying GCC weighting schemes which are robust to both of these conditions. This paper details an alternative approach which attempts to employ a signal dependent criterion, namely the estimated periodicity of harmonic spectral intervals, to design a GCC filter appropriate for the combination of noise and multipath signal distortions. Simulations are performed across a range of room conditions to illustrate the utility of the proposed time-delay estimation method relative to conventional GCC filtering approaches.