Estimation of TDOA for room reflections by iterative weighted l1 constraint

Abstract

Estimation of Time Difference of Arrivals (TDOAs) corresponding to early room reflections can be formulated as a Blind Channel Identification (BCI) problem, exploiting signals acquired by a set of microphones, given an unknown transmitted source. To cope with the intrinsic noise sensitivity and ill-posedness of the problem, sparsity and non-negativity priors on the Acoustic Impulse Response (AIR) of the room can be exploited. Here we propose a novel iterative method, resulting in a sequence of convex problems relying on a weighted l <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</inf> constraint. The proposed method allows to outperform current state of the art on speech and non-speech real signals, while lowering the number of parameters to tune and the sensitivity of solution given the few free parameters.