Robust TDE-based DOA estimation for compact audio arrays

Cross-correlation based time delay estimates (TDE) can be used for direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation with an acoustic array in not-too-reverberant environments. In order to benefit from the computational efficiency of TDE-based DOA estimation, and concentrating on applications that use a compact microphone array and low sampling frequency, we use a combination of approaches to make TDE-based DOA estimation more robust under reverberant conditions. Cross-correlation interpolation based on the Goertzel algorithm is used for generalized cross-correlation TDE as well as in the steered-response-power algorithm used for comparison. The generalized cross-correlation TDE algorithm precedes a robust TDE-to-DOA process. The latter includes DOA and crosscorrelation dependent weighting of the various TDE and removal of an outlier TDE. When the use of TDE from consecutive frames is possible, further performance improvement results from unit-norm DOA adaptation. Performance is evaluated for simulated and recorded data.