Analysis of time-delay estimation in reverberant environments

The main obstacle for designing robust microphone-based source localization systems is the effects of room reverberation. Utilizing results from statistical room acoustics, we analyze the performance of GCC-based methods for time-delay estimation. An interesting outcome of the analysis is that the so-called PHAT time-delay estimator is shown to be optimal among a class of cross-correlation based time-delay estimators.