Three different reliability criteria for Time Delay estimates

Time Difference Of Arrival (TDOA) estimates are often used for passive acoustic single sound source localization with microphone arrays. Commonly, the Generalized Cross-Correlation method is applied for TDOA estimation. In real environments the reliability of TDOA estimates is degraded due to noise and especially to room reverberation. This work presents three reliability criteria allowing convincingly the evaluation of the confidence of every single TDOA estimate. The criteria are evaluated and compared to each other for real data recorded in a noisy and reverberant office room environment. The use of the reliability criteria permits a robust sound source localization even in adverse acoustic environments with increased reverberation times.