Performance evaluation of time-delay estimation in non-Gaussian conditions

In recent years, time delay estimation TDE processors for non-Gaussian conditions were developed and it has been shown that exploiting the non-Gaussianity of the processes can lead to improved performance, relative to the Gaussian case. However, while for the later standard tools (as the Cramer-Rao bound) can easily be applied to predict the achievable performance, for the general, non-Gaussian case using such tools rarely leads to analytical solutions. In this paper we present a close-form expression for a figure of merit FOM for any TDE processor under any statistical model. It is then evaluated for different TDE processors and it is confirmed (by simulations) that the proposed FOM accurately predicts the performance of these processors for reasonable values of time-bandwidth product.