Blind compensation of inter-channel sampling frequency mismatch with maximum likelihood estimation in STFT domain

This paper proposes a novel blind compensation of sampling frequency mismatch for asynchronous microphone array. Digital signals simultaneously observed by different recording devices have drift of the time differences between the observation channels because of the sampling frequency mismatch among the devices. Based on the model that such the time difference is constant within each time frame, but varies proportional to the time frame index, the effect of the sampling frequency mismatch can be compensated in the short-time Fourier transform domain by the linear phase shift. By assuming the sources are motionless and stationary, a likelihood of the sampling frequency mismatch is formulated. The maximum likelihood estimation is obtained effectively by a golden section search.