Time Delay Estimation: A New Insight Into the Woody's Method

This letter introduces a new insight into the Woody's method, a well-known time delay estimator. Firstly, we show that this classical technique used to analyze a variable latency signal is suboptimal. Thereby, we present an improved version of the Woody's method that formalizes and outperforms the previous one with an unknown signal using an iterative maximum likelihood estimator. Unlike recent approaches, the problem is expressed in the time domain in order to produce a general framework that allows the inclusion of some a priori information.