Determination of the relative position of a source and receiver by time-delay spectrometry

A new method of measuring the transit time of acoustic signals is discussed; it is based on the use of wideband swept-frequency signals and exhibits high accuracy, noise immunity, and simple hardware implementation. The accuracy of the results can be increased several orders of magnitude according to a narrowband deconvolution procedure developed by the authors. The gain can be close to the channel signal-to-noise ratio, as is indeed confirmed by the results of numerical calculations and full-scale experiments.