A comparative study on time delay estimation in reverberant and noisy environments

Time delay estimation (TDE) has been a research topic of significant practical importance in many fields. It is the first stage that feeds into subsequent processing blocks of a multiple-channel system for identifying, localizing, and tracking radiating sources. Various TDE algorithms were developed in the past few decades, and their performance was assessed independently of each other when each algorithm was developed. This paper is to provide a comparative study to illustrate the performance differences among several representative TDE algorithms in room acoustic environments where reverberation, noise, and interference are commonly encountered.