Performance study of time delay estimation in a room environment [microphone arrays]

Time delay estimation (TDE) is often used for source localization in microphone arrays and the performance of TDE is always affected by the reverberation in a room. In this paper, the performance of TDE in a rectangular room environment is studied for microphone arrays. The probability of anomalies of time delay estimates is obtained theoretically for the multi-path propagation in the room. The effects of the room reverberation on the TDE under different microphone patterns, microphone position configurations and spacings between the microphones are evaluated.