APPROACHES FOR TIME DIFFERENCE OF ARRIVAL ESTIMATION IN A NOISY AND REVERBERANT ENVIRONMENT

Determining the spatial position of a speaker finds a growing interest in video conference scenario where automated camera steering and tracking are required. As a preliminary step for the localization, microphone array can be used to extract the time difference of arrival (TDOA) of the speech signal. The direction of arrival of the speech signal is then determined by the relative time delay between each, spatially separated, microphone pairs. In this work we present novel, frequency domain, approaches for TDOA calculation in a reverberant and noisy environment. Our methods are based on the speech quasi-stationarity property, and on the fact that the speech and the noise are uncorrelated. The proposed methods are supported by an extensive experimental study. 1