Time delay estimation via average magnitude differences among multiple microphone signals

Time delay estimation (TDE) plays a significant role in hands-free speech communication systems for localizing and tracking speakers. To boost the robustness of time delay estimators in room acoustic environments, a novel TDE approach is proposed in this paper. This method first exploits the reciprocals of average magnitude difference functions of sound signals captured at a microphone array, instead of cross correlation coefficients, to construct the entries of the parameterized correlation coefficient matrix in the multichannel cross-correlation coefficient algorithm. A multichannel average magnitude difference coefficient is then defined to establish the phase delay estimator. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed TDE strategy can yield better performance in noisy and reverberant environments as compared to the multichannel cross-correlation coefficient method.