Adaptive time delay estimation using filter length constraints for source localization in reverberant acoustic environments

Adaptive time delay estimation based on blind system identification (BSI) focuses on the impulse responses between a source and a microphone to estimate the time difference of arrival (TDOA) in reverberant environments. In this letter, we consider the adaptive eigenvalue decomposition (AED) BSI method based on the normalized multichannel frequency-domain least mean square (NMCFLMS) algorithm. We show that the use of filter length constraints (FLC) based on the maximum TDOA between microphones improves the performance of the NMCFLMS filter for the localization of different sound types in highly reverberant environments. The experimental results demonstrate the improvement of the proposed method for reverberation times (RT60) of up to 2 s. Applications for this method include teleconferencing systems, musical interfaces, videogames, and monitoring systems. © 1994-2012 IEEE.