An adaptive Butler-Cantoni based time delay estimation (ABCTDE) method IIR whitening filtering approach

The estimation of time delay between the two spatially separated noisy signals by modelling the problem as system identification with input and output corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise is addressed. The time delay estimation problem is equivalent to that of system delay optimization. The proposed method is based on the adaptive Butler-Cantoni (ABC) equalizer. The ABC approach decouples the noise power estimation from channel estimation. The separation noise variance estimation and the channel estimation open the way for a variety of noise variance estimation techniques. We propose an IIR filter based whitening approach using the Burg algorithm to eliminate the noise effects before updating the equalizer coefficients. Matching the system delay to the time delay results in a noise robust estimator. Simulation results confirm the superiority of this approach at low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs).