A fast algorithm for bispectra based time delay estimation

Time delay estimation has been a problem of considerable practice interest in sonar design for a long time. The conventional estimation, GCC processor, has poor performance when the signal to noise ratio is small. C.L. Nikias and others show that the performance of estimation can be improved if higher-order spectra(polyspectra) are used. But not only conventional bispectrum methods, but also parametric bispectrum methods are difficult to implement, due to complication of calculation, such as: matrix multiplication and inversion. In this paper, bispectra based time delay estimator, which has some genuine advantages in implementation, is developed by using the principle of generalized cross-spectra method proposed by Li, Qihu (1984)