Array steered response time-alignment for propagation delay compensation for acoustic localization

Locating a source using direction estimates from spatially separated microphone arrays has been widely researched. The directions are traditionally obtained by steering the array to a direction that maximizes the response. A more robust approach is to directly combine the array steered responses and maximize the resulting spatial likelihood function. However, in the atmosphere the propagation delay from source to array is typically significant, causing true source position and the estimated direction to differ. Localization methods using directional estimates that compensate this delay exist. This work proposes delay compensation for steered array responses to increase localization performance. The method is shown to improve robustness against source movement.