Time delay estimation for deterministic transients using second- and higher-order correlations.
Lisa A. Pflug, George E. Ioup, Juliette W. Ioup, Robert L. Field, James H. Leclere · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1991
Computer simulations are used to evaluate the performance of cross correlations, bicorrelations, and tricorrelations for time delay estimation of bandlimited deterministic transients in the presence of Gaussian noise for both known and unknown sources. Signals with and without multipath distortion are analyzed. Comparisons of performance are based on probabilities of correct correlation peak location as well as means, standard deviations, and maximum error values of incorrect correlation peak locations for a sequence of signal-to-noise ratios. The effects of rectification on these measures are investigated. For an unknown source, the higher-order correlations (with and without rectification) give higher probabilities of correct peak location than second order for some signals. For most signals with an unknown source, the standard deviations of incorrect peak locations are significantly lowered using rectification. Rectification does not produce this result when using a known source. For known source cases, the cross correlation usually shows higher probability of correct peak location than the higher-order correlations. [Work supported by NOARL.]