Underwater Acoustic Time Delay Estimation Based on Envelope Differences of Correlation Functions

This paper proposes underwater acoustic time delay estimation based on the envelope differences of correlation functions (EDCF), which mitigates the delay estimation errors introduced by the amplitude fluctuations of the correlation function envelopes in the traditional correlation methods (CM). The performance of the proposed delay estimation method under different time values was analyzed, and the optimal difference time values are given. To overcome the influences of digital signal sampling intervals on time delay estimation, a digital time delay estimation approach with low complexity and high accuracy is proposed. The performance of the proposed time delay estimation was analyzed in underwater multipath channels. Finally, the accuracy of the delay estimation using this proposed method was demonstrated by experiments.