A compressed encoding scheme for approximate TDOA estimation

Accurate estimation of time-difference of arrival (TDOAs) is necessary to perform accurate sound source localization. The problem has traditionally been solved by using methods such as Generalized Cross-Correlation, which uses the entire signal to accurately estimate TDOAs. However, this could pose a problem in distributed sensor networks in which the amount of data that can be transmitted from each sensor to a fusion center is limited, such as in underwater scenarios or other adverse environments. Inspired by approaches from computer vision, in this paper we identify scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) keypoints in the signal spectrogram. We perform cross-correlation on the signal using only the information available at those extracted keypoints. We test our algorithm in scenarios featuring different noise and reverberation conditions, and using different speech signals and source locations. We show that our algorithm can estimate time-difference of arrivals (TDOAs) and the source location within an acceptable error range at a compression ratio of 40:1.