Time-delay estimation of reverberated speech exploiting harmonic structure.

The relative time delay associated with a speech signal received at a pair of spatially separated microphones is a key component in talker localization and microphone array beamforming procedures. The traditional method for estimating this parameter utilizes the generalized cross correlation (GCC), the performance of which is compromised by the presence of room reverberations and background noise. Typically, the GCC filtering criteria used are either focused on the signal degradations due to additive noise or those due exclusively to multipath channel effects. There has been relatively little success at applying GCC weighting schemes which are robust to both of these conditions. This paper details an alternative approach which attempts to employ a signal-dependent criterion, namely, the estimated periodicity of the speech signal, to design a GCC filter appropriate for the combination of noise and multipath distortions. Simulations are performed across a range of room conditions to illustrate the utility of the proposed time-delay estimation method relative to conventional GCC filtering approaches.