Extension of Time-Difference-of-Arrival Self Calibration Solutions Using Robust Multilateration

Recent advances in robust self-calibration have made it possible to estimate microphone positions and at least partial sound source positions using ambient sound. However, there are limits on how well sound source paths can be recovered using state-of-the-art techniques. In this paper we develop and evaluate several techniques to extend partial and incomplete solutions. We present minimal solvers for sound source positioning using non-overlapping pairs of microphone positions and their respective time-difference measurements, and show how these new solvers can be used in a hypothesis and test setting. We also investigate techniques that exploit temporal smoothness of the sound source paths. The different techniques are evaluated on both real and synthetic data, and compared to several state-of-the-art techniques for time-difference-of-arrival multilateration.